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Biography
Born May 21, 1844, in Laval, France, Henri Rousseau attended the lycée there until 1860. While working for a lawyer in 1863, Rousseau was charged with petty larceny and joined the army to avoid scandal. He never saw combat and did not travel outside France, but his colleagues’ adventures in Mexico inspired him to create legends of his own foreign journeys. Upon his father’s death in 1868, Rousseau left the army. The following year, he entered the Paris municipal toll-collecting service as a second-class clerk; he was never promoted although he has traditionally been called “Le Douanier” (customs official). In 1884, Rousseau obtained a permit to sketch in the national museums. He sent two paintings to the Salon des Champs-Elysées in 1885, and from 1886 until his death he exhibited annually at the Salon des Indépendants.
By 1893, Rousseau retired from the toll service on a small pension and began to paint full-time. The same year, the artist met the writer Alfred Jarry, who encouraged him and introduced him into literary circles. In 1899, he wrote a five-act play entitled La Vengeance d’une Orpheline Russe. A waltz he composed, “Clémence,” was published in 1904. Rousseau became friendly with Robert Delaunay by 1906. In 1908, he began to hold musical and family evenings in his studio. Late that year, Picasso arranged a banquet in honor of Rousseau, which was attended by Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Marie Laurencin, among others. (continued on the bottom)
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His best known paintings are of jungles, even though he never left France or saw a jungle. Stories spread by admirers that his army service included the French expeditionary force to Mexico are unfounded. His inspiration came from illustrated books and the botanical gardens in Paris, as well as tableaux of 'taxidermified' wild animals. He described his frequent visits to the Jardin des Plantes: "When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream."
As well as his exotic scenes there was a concurrent output of smaller topographical images of the city and its suburbs. He claimed to have invented a new genre of portrait landscape, which he achieved by starting a painting with a view such as a favourite part of the city, and then depicting a person in the foreground.
He painted in layers — starting with a sky in the background and ending with animals or people in the foreground. The rain in Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) (1891), (National Gallery, London), his first jungle painting, is achieved in an innovatory way with thin light grey strands of paint slanting across the canvas with a glaze or varnish.
When Rousseau painted jungles he could use over fifty varieties of green. Although derived from nature, his foliage is adapted to his artistic needs and no longer recognisable as particular plants. He worked on each painting for a considerable length of time and consequently his oeuvre is not extensive. He used a student grade of paint because of his financial limitations. In some paintings certain areas of overpainting, e.g. foreground foliage, is now badly cracked, due to incorrect technical procedure.
Because of his naive style, Rousseau had many critics and often people were shocked by his work or ridiculed it. His ingenuousness was extreme, and he was not aware that establishment artists considered him untutored. He always aspired, in vain, to conventional acceptance. People said that he painted like a child and did not know what he was doing, but the work shows sophistication in his particular technique. Amedeo Modigliani was one artist who was influenced by the Naïve art style.
By 1909, Rousseau’s paintings were acquired by the dealers Ambroise Vollard and Joseph Brummer. His first solo show was arranged in 1909 by Wilhelm Uhde and took place in a furniture shop in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Rousseau died September 2, 1910, in Paris. The same year, an exhibition of his work in the collection of Max Weber took place at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery “291” in New York. He was given a retrospective at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911. Rousseau’s jungle paintings fill the last two galleries of this exhibition, culminating in the Museum of Modern Art’s sublime “Dream” (1910), which was possibly the last of the series. It brings all the habitués of this humid zone back, as if for a final curtain call. Two Hicks-ite lions stare from the underbrush, along with several monkeys, two birds, an elephant and a pipe player. In their midst the nude, tipped onto the red couch, surveys the wildlife with the imperiousness of Manet’s “Olympia.”