Henri Rousseau

Henri Rousseau was a post-impressionist painter who painted in the style of naive or primitivism. Not an academically trained artist, he earned his money as a customs official and liked to claim that his only teacher was nature; however, he also gathered some advice from established painters Félix Auguste-Clément and Jean-Léon Gérôm.

Rousseau looked for motifs on postcards, photographs and in magazines, in botanical books and on visits to forests and zoos. Despite his famous jungle paintings, he never set foot in exotic landscapes. Its wild animals were already appreciated by Picasso, and today also by the profession. His most famous pictures are precisely pictures of the jungle. In fact, it was a tamed and “mediated” nature. “When I enter a greenhouse and see strange plants from exotic lands, it seems to me that I have entered a dream,” said Rousseau. This dreamscape was depicted by Rousseau in a playful , in a somewhat childish style that resembled illustrations in picture books. Many “more respectable” painters found this terribly amusing; they had an object of ridicule. However, over time this changed – starting in 1886, the doors were opened to Rousseau every year to the annual review of French art, the Salon des Indépendants (Salon of Independents).

Henri Rousseau devoted himself completely to painting only after retiring from bureaucratic work in 1893. About a decade later, his work was also discovered by Pablo Picasso, who then also decided to visit Rousseau and organized a banquet in honor of the painter, who called himself the inventor of the landscape portrait. A similar honor was shown to him by the mother of the artist Robert Delaunay, Baroness Delaunay, who commissioned the painting The Snake Charmer from Rousseau.

He exhibited his last painting, The Dream, at the Salon only a few months before his death on September 2, 1910.