The customs clerk whose jungles never left Paris
Henri Rousseau, 21 May 1844 to 2 September 1910, painted exotic forests while working toll gates, earning the nickname Le Douanier. Critics mocked the Naïve canvases; Picasso threw him a banquet; later avant-gardes treated the self-taught customs officer as a secret modern.
Rousseau was born in Laval, in the Mayenne, in 1844 to a tinsmith who put him to work as a small child. When his father fell into debt and the family house was seized, the boy became a boarder at the local school, where he was middling at most subjects but took prizes in drawing and music. After clerking for a lawyer he joined the army in 1863, reportedly to escape the consequences of a minor perjury, and served four years. In 1868 he moved to Paris to support his widowed mother and married Clemence Boitard, with whom he had six children; from 1871 he collected the octroi, the duty on goods entering the city.
He took up painting seriously in his forties with no formal training, and exhibited at the Salon des Independants from 1886. His jungles are pure Paris: he never left France, and admirers' tales that he had served in Mexico are false. He drew on the botanical garden, stuffed animals at the natural history museum, children's book illustrations and soldiers' stories. When Tiger in a Tropical Storm appeared in 1891, the young Felix Vallotton wrote his first serious review.
At 49 he retired on a small pension, topping it up by tutoring children and drawing covers for Le Petit Journal, and from 1893 he worked in a Montparnasse studio. The Sleeping Gypsy followed in 1897. In 1905 his Hungry Lion hung near Matisse and the other Fauves and may have helped inspire their name, and in 1907 Robert Delaunay's mother commissioned The Snake Charmer.
Picasso, spotting one of his canvases sold on the street for reuse, sought him out and in 1908 threw a half-mocking banquet for him at the Bateau-Lavoir, attended by Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein and others. Rousseau showed his last picture, The Dream, in March 1910. A leg infection turned gangrenous, and he died of a blood clot after surgery that September; Brancusi carved Apollinaire's epitaph on his tombstone.
Source: Henri Rousseau
