Henri Rousseau painted tigers, monkeys and forests so thick that the sky barely shows, and he never left France. For over two decades he checked carts for the city toll at the gates of Paris, and his paintings also take in a rugby match and a sitter in a red fez whose name is still disputed.
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A Toll Clerk Who Painted the Tropics
Rousseau's nickname, Le Douanier, the customs officer, came from that job at the city gates. He was self-taught, and he first showed his work in 1886 at a salon open to anyone, with no jury to turn him away.
His tropical forests came from Paris as well: the hothouses and the zoo of the Jardin des Plantes, illustrated magazines, books for children. He never set foot in a jungle, and the forests fill only part of his work, which also holds a winter night in costume, a battlefield, sport and his friends.
His working life ran from the first works he exhibited to the last canvas he finished, in 1910, his final year.
12. Portrait of Monsieur X, Pierre Loti (1906)
A man with a black moustache and a red fez holds a cigarette and meets our eyes. A striped cat sits at his shoulder, and a row of factory chimneys rises behind him.
Nobody has ever settled who this man is, which is why the picture carries two names, Portrait of Monsieur X (Pierre Loti). Pierre Loti was the pen name of Julien Viaud, a French naval officer who also wrote novels.
The case for Loti rests on an earlier picture. In 1891, fifteen years before this one, Rousseau had exhibited a portrait of Pierre Loti with a cat. No document shows that the two men ever met, though, and Rousseau may have worked from a photograph or a newspaper cutting. Why he came back to the same writer, with a cat once again, in 1906 is not known.
Its first known owner had no interest in the question. The satirical writer Georges Courteline, who probably had the canvas from 1906, hung it in what he called his Musée des Horreurs, a collection of paintings he found laughable.
The double name came later. When the German critic and dealer Wilhelm Uhde reproduced the picture in 1914, he called it Portrait of Mr. X (Pierre Loti), which gave the man in the fez an unknown name and a famous one at once.
Then, in 1952, a Parisian man of letters named Edmond Achille Frank said he recognized himself in the picture. Rousseau had been dead for forty two years.
At a Glance
Artist: Henri Rousseau (1844 to 1910)
Painted: 1906
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 61 × 50 cm (24 × 19 3/4 in)
Where to see it: Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich
11. The Muse Inspiring the Poet (1909)
Much larger than the man beside her, a heavy woman in a long violet dress raises one hand above his head. He is dressed in black and holds a quill and a scroll. They stand in a grove of trees, and a neat row of flowers lines the foot of the picture. Those flowers are the wrong ones.