Rousseau, Henri Julien Félix

Rousseau, Henri Julien Félix (1844-1910), French painter known as Le Douanier Rousseau. He was a self-taught artist and is considered one of the most remarkable primitive painters. His bold colours, flat designs, and imaginative subject matter were praised and imitated by modern European painters.

Rousseau was born in Laval, the son of a tinsmith. He abandoned his secondary school education and entered military service, during which he met soldiers who had returned from Mexico after the French campaign to support Emperor Maximilian. It was their descriptions of the country that almost certainly inspired the lush, vivid jungle scenes that were to be the subject of much of Rousseau's paintings. After his discharge from the army, he obtained a position with the Paris toll, which explains his sobriquet Le Douanier (The Customs Man). On his retirement in 1885 he devoted himself to painting.

Although he lacked formal training, Rousseau soon showed great skill in composition and colour. From 1886 on he exhibited his work at the Salon des Indépendants, winning the admiration of such contemporaries as Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat. After painting mainly portraits and Parisian scenes, during the 1890s he turned to highly original depictions of fantasy. These mature pictures typically depict tropical scenes with human figures at rest or play and with beasts mysteriously charmed to an alert stillness. The Dream (1910) shows a nude reclining on a couch in a vividly coloured jungle full of enormous plants, with glaring lions and other animals nearby. In The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) a woman sleeps peacefully in the desert while a lion, its tail in the air, examines her curiously. These and his Jungle with a Lion (1904-1906) are in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.