Henri Julien Rousseau was born in Laval in the Loire Valley into the family of a plumber. He attended Laval High School as a day student and then as a boarder, after his father became a debtor and his parents had to leave the town upon the seizure of their house. He was mediocre in some subjects at the high school but won prizes for drawing and music. He worked for a lawyer and studied law, but "attempted a small perjury and sought refuge in the army," serving for four years, starting in 1863. With his father's death, Rousseau moved to Paris in 1868 to support his widowed mother as a government employee. With his new job in hand, in 1869 he started a relationship with a cabinetmaker's daughter, Clemence Boitard, who became his first wife and he wrote a waltz bearing her name. They went on to have nine children but tuberculosis was rife at the time and seven died at an early age. In 1871, he was promoted to the toll collector's office in Paris as a tax collector. He started painting seriously in his early forties, and by age 49 he retired from his job to work on his art. His wife died in 1888 and he later remarried.

Rousseau claimed he had "no teacher other than nature", although he admitted he had received "some advice" from two established Academic painters, Felix Auguste-Clement and Jean-Leon Gerome. Essentially he was self-taught and is considered to be a naive or primitive painter.

henri rousseau is considered the archetype of the modern naive artist. He is known for his richly coloured and meticulously detailed pictures of lush jungles, wild beasts, and exotic figures. After exhibiting with the Fauves in 1905, he gained the admiration of avant-garde artists.

During his last years Rousseau painted chiefly exotic landscapes, of which The Hungry Lion was the first major example. The paintings are characterized by a profusion of exotic plant growth painted with great attention to detail. The many different leaf forms that Rousseau depicted were probably based on plants that he studied at the botanical garden in Paris. He rendered each leaf separately yet with an eye toward overall design; each branch of leaves constitutes an almost abstract pattern. In the midst of this vegetal density, colourful birds flit about and mysterious animals stare out at the viewer. There is usually some dramatic incident taking place in the centre, such as a lion attacking its prey, which is in keeping with Rousseau’s continued predilection toward the grandiose, historical, dramatic narratives of traditional academic painting.

Although he had ambitions to become a famous academic painter, Rousseau instead became the virtual opposite: the quintessential "naïve" artist. Largely self-taught, Rousseau developed a style that evidenced his lack of academic training, with its absence of correct proportions, one-point perspective, and use of sharp, often unnatural colors. Such features resulted in a body of work imbued with a sense of mystery and eccentricity.

The untutored and idiosyncratic character of Rousseau's art was derided by many early viewers of his work, with one Parisian journalist memorably writing that "Monsieur Rousseau paints with his feet with his eyes closed." Yet this quality resonated with modern artists such as Picasso, who saw in Rousseau's work a model for the sincerity and directness to which they aspired in their own work, by drawing inspiration from African tribal masks and other "primitive" and traditional art forms.

Influenced by a combination of "high" and "low" sources - academic sculpture, postcards, tabloid illustrations, and trips to the Paris public zoo and gardens - Rousseau created modern, unconventional renderings of traditional genres such as landscape, portraiture, and allegory. The fantastic, often outrageous imagery that resulted from these hybrid influences - most famously, a nude woman reclining on a divan mysteriously located in a tropical jungle - was celebrated by the Surrealists, whose art valued surprising juxtapositions and dream-like moods characteristic of Rousseau's work.

n.g.jhonzsonn www.arteffusionsglobal.org/metanoia

artist-curator

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