Henri Rousseau

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was born in Laval, in the Mayenne region of northwestern France, in 1844. He served in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and subsequently worked as a minor customs official in Paris — a post that earned him the nickname 'le Douanier' (the Customs Officer). He began painting seriously in his forties without formal training and spent his career outside every official institution, exhibiting with the Salon des Indépendants from 1886, where any artist could show without jury selection.\n\nRousseau's painting is the great paradox of nineteenth-century French art: technically self-taught and in many respects naively executed, it is simultaneously among the most original and visually arresting work produced in Paris during the era of Impressionism. His jungle paintings — vast, densely vegetated imaginary landscapes populated by exotic animals, moonlit skies, and dreaming figures — have no precedent. He claimed to have served in Mexico during the French intervention, though this seems to have been fantasy; his actual inspiration for the tropics came from botanical gardens and illustrated magazines. Yet the lush, flat, obsessively detailed foliage and the hypnotic stillness of these scenes carry a psychological authority that no amount of academic training could have produced.\n\nRousseau died in 1910, lonely and largely unrecognized by the broader public, though he had been championed in his final years by Picasso, who hosted a famous banquet in his honor, and by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. He was recognized posthumously as a founding figure of naive art and a forerunner of Surrealism; his jungle canvases — among them The Sleeping Gypsy and The Dream — are among the most beloved and reproduced images in modern art.