Henri Rousseau: The Complete Story
Henri Rousseau was the self taught French painter of dreamlike jungles, a customs clerk who never left France yet filled his canvases with tigers, lions and giant moonlit flowers. Trained painters laughed at his flat, childlike style. Then Picasso threw him a banquet, and the avant garde crowned the amateur a master.
He is proof that the rules of the academy are not the same thing as imagination. He had almost none of the first and an ocean of the second.
The Sunday painter
Rousseau spent his working life as a Paris toll collector, which earned him the nickname Le Douanier, the customs man. He painted on weekends, taught himself from books and museums, and only took it up seriously in his forties. He never had a single proper lesson.
Jungles he never saw
His most famous works are steaming jungles: The Dream, Tiger in a Tropical Storm, The Sleeping Gypsy. Yet Rousseau never left France. He built his jungles from the hothouses of the Paris botanical garden, the zoo, and cheap picture books, then made them feel more real than the real thing.
Laughed at, then loved
The Salon critics mocked his flat space and stiff figures for years. But a younger generation saw something modern in his directness. In 1908 Picasso threw a famous banquet in his honor, and writers like Apollinaire took him seriously. The amateur had become a hero to the avant garde.
On trial, and the customs myth
Two things people get wrong about Rousseau. First, he was never really a border customs officer; he was a modest Paris toll clerk who checked goods coming into the city, yet the grander nickname stuck for life. Second, in 1907 he was dragged into court over his part in a bank fraud. He got off lightly, partly because the judges decided he was too innocent to have grasped the scheme, the very naivety his critics mocked in his paintings. Even the law treated him like one of his own wide eyed figures.
A dream logic of his own
Flat space, hard outlines, impossible silence: whether his naive eye was innocent or quietly knowing is still argued. Either way he opened a door. The landscape he invented looked back to no one and forward to the Surrealists, who claimed him as an ancestor.
The works to know
A handful of paintings carry his fame: The Dream, The Sleeping Gypsy, Tiger in a Tropical Storm, and Carnival Evening. Each one is a still, strange world you could step into.
Quick answers about Henri Rousseau
Who was Henri Rousseau? A self taught French painter famous for his jungle scenes.
When was he born? In Laval, France, in 1844.
How did he die? In Paris, in 1910, of a leg infection, still poor.
What is he famous for? Dreamlike jungle paintings like The Dream and The Sleeping Gypsy.
What style is he? Naive art, a precursor of Surrealism.
Where can I see his work? MoMA in New York holds The Dream and The Sleeping Gypsy.
Rousseau finished The Dream, his last great jungle, only months before he died in 1910, poor and still dismissed by the official art world. It now hangs in MoMA, and the customs clerk who never left France is one of the most loved painters of his age.