Henri Rousseau

Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), known as Le Douanier (the customs officer), was a French self-taught painter whose naive, visionary canvases became one of the most celebrated bodies of work in modern art history. Born in Laval, he worked as a toll collector for the Paris customs service — hence the nickname — and painted in his spare time, entirely without formal training. He exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants from 1886, where his paintings of jungle scenes, exotic animals, and dreamlike forests were initially ridiculed as clumsy and childish. Works such as Carnival Evening (1886) and Rendezvous in the Forest (1889) show his early manner: figures and forests in an airless, flat, mysteriously compelling space quite unlike anything in academic tradition. His famous jungle paintings — in which lions and tigers lurk among impossibly lush tropical vegetation — were produced by a man who had never left France, drawing on illustrations from books and visits to the Paris botanical garden. Walk in the Wood (1886), Jungle with Lion (1904), and Scouts Attacked by a Tiger (1904) are characteristic. Late in life he was championed by Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, and the Paris avant-garde, who recognised in his work a pre-rational purity that academic training had destroyed in professional painters. Picasso gave a famous banquet in his honour in 1908.

Rousseau's style is unmistakable: flat, carefully outlined forms; an absence of atmospheric perspective; obsessive attention to leaf-by-leaf botanical detail combined with complete indifference to anatomical accuracy; a palette of brilliant, unmodulated greens, blues, and yellows. His compositions have a dreamlike stillness in which the familiar and the threatening coexist without resolution. His naive handling, far from being a deficiency, creates an effect of visionary intensity that sophisticated training cannot replicate.

Rousseau is one of the foundational figures in the history of naive and outsider art and his influence on twentieth-century art was enormous. His work was a revelation to Picasso, the Surrealists, and later to the Pop artists — a demonstration that artistically powerful painting need not depend on academic tradition. He is the grandfather of every subsequent celebration of untrained intuitive creativity in Western art.