Henri Rousseau: The Naive Genius of the Jungle

Exploring the Imaginative World and Unique Style of a Self-Taught Visionary

Henri Rousseau was a French painter known for his vivid and imaginative jungle scenes, which he created using a unique and naive style. He is considered a self-taught, visionary artist and a precursor of the Surrealist movement.

The son of a carpenter, Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was born on May 21 1844, in Laval, France. When he was eight years old, his family was made bankrupt and consequently lost their home. Rousseau was left in the care of a boarding school, where he developed a love of drawing.

Rousseau attended school in Laval until 1860. In his late teens, he was employed at a law firm. However, his career path changed forever when he committed perjury and was arrested. To evade his jail sentence, Rousseau signed up for the French army in 1863. However, he still had to serve a one month sentence. Rousseau’s father passed away in 1868 and he was excused from army duties so that he could support his mother.

On leaving the army Rousseau moved to Paris, where he began working as a customs officer at the entrance to the city. It was at this time that Rousseau also married his first wife, Clemence Boitard. After losing several children in infancy, their one surviving offspring, Julia, lived on into adulthood. Rousseau’s sole aim was to master an academic style, and he genuinely believed that his pictures were compelling and real. The artist was such a sincere and genuine character, that he took even sarcastic remarks literally and accepted them as praise. His positive outlook helped him endure great poverty. Many contemporary critics regarded his working class background as a drawback.

In 1871, shortly after his first marriage, Rousseau was hired by Paris Octroi where his job was to collect tax on goods coming into Paris. The job included long stints of free time, which probably gave Rousseau an opportunity to focus on his art. While working as a customs officer in Paris, Rousseau taught himself to paint and would exhibit his work almost every year from 1886 until his death. He earned the moniker “Le Douanier” from his comrades in the Parisian avant-garde.

Rousseau had never had a formal art education; instead, he taught himself by faithfully replicating paintings in the art museums of Paris and by sketching in the city’s botanical gardens and natural history museums. Because he had not studied art according to any prescribed method or under any teacher’s supervision, the artist developed a highly personal style which was to prove his point of difference.

His earliest known works were local views, naïve in both their detail and in their perception. This seemingly direct storytelling then led to inventive, imaginative, and dream-like works. However obsessed Rousseau was with exact and particular detail, he was able to control his composition, consolidating what might have been a host of minute and disparate observations into a coherent whole. He worked slowly and carefully, applying many layers of paint and exotic jewel-like color.

As Rousseau had not learned anatomy or perspective; his paintings’ vivid colors, ambiguous spaces, non-realistic scale and dramatic intensity gave them a surreal quality. Sometimes Rousseau borrowed details from paintings he had viewed at museums or images he had seen in books and magazines, transforming them into elements of his own visions.

Although he set his sights on becoming a famous academic painter, ironically, Rousseau instead became the complete opposite: a quintessential naïve artist. Largely self-taught, Rousseau developed a style that laid bare his lack of academic training. One-point perspective, the absence of correct proportions and the use of piercing, often unnatural colors resulted in a body of work imbued with mystery and unconventionality. In one of his paintings the bananas are shown growing upside-down and in other paintings he grouped together animals from different continents that would never live side by side in the wild.

In 1884 Rousseau had begun to copy work in the Louvre. He studied briefly with the academic painter Jean Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1886 Rousseau exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants, where he exhibited fairly regularly until his death. He supported himself by giving lessons in painting, diction, and music and he was a skilled violinist.

The following year he painted Carnival Evening and A Thunderbolt. Followed by Expectation, A Poor Fellow, After the Feast, Departure, Picnic, The Suicide, For my Father, Myself Self-Portrait, Tiger Chasing Explorers, A Hundred Years of Independence, Liberty, The Last of the 41st, War and some 200 drawings, both pen and ink and pencil, along with some landscapes of Paris.

Many of Rousseau’s signature paintings depicted human figures or wild animals in jungle-like settings such as Tiger in a Tropical Storm of 1891. In each of his paintings there is typically a dramatic event, taking place in the center, such as a lion attacking its prey. This is in keeping with Rousseau’s preference for grandiose, historical and dramatic narratives within traditional painting.

Using student quality paint due to limited finances, Rousseau spent a considerable amount of time on each painting, so his collection of work is not extensive. His painting technique was also unique since he applied one layer of paint at a time, creating multiple layers in each piece. He painted each color one by one — firstly the blues and then the greens and so on — and painted from top to bottom. When Rousseau painted jungles, he sometimes used more than 50 shades of green. Although from nature, his foliage was adapted to suit his artistic needs and is often unrecognizable as a particular plant.

Also the careful blending of brushstrokes that result in a smooth surface is representative of his individualized approach to painting. Another quality of his technique was the use of controlled brush strokes which make each object in the painting appear outlined. Rousseau’s work was characterized by heavy dependence on line, stiff portraiture, wild juxtapositions and flattened perspective from which the Cubists and Surrealists drew heavily. His imagination was central to his work.

Although Rousseau’s art was not understood or accepted by the conservative, official art world of Paris, he was able to show his work in annual exhibitions organized by the Société des Artistes Indépendants. He submitted works to these open, un-juried shows from 1886 until the end of his life. His art was seen and appreciated by established artists such as Camille Pissarro and Paul Signac, who praised his direct, emotional approach to his subject matter.

Rousseau’s colleagues at Paris Octroi continued to support his artistic pursuits and in 1893, at the age of 49, Rousseau retired from his paid employment and was able to dedicate himself to his art full-time. That year he met the writer Alfred Jarry, who introduced him to members of the Parisian artistic and literary avant-garde, including Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Marie Laurencin, all of whom became admirers of his work.

In 1897, Rousseau painted The Sleeping Gypsy. This fantastical depiction of a lion with a sleeping woman on a moonlit night is one of the most recognisable artworks of modern times. In 1898, 10 years after the death of his first wife from Tuberculosis, Rousseau married Josephine Noury. She died just a few years later in 1903, leaving the artist heartbroken.

Rousseau’s career then suffered a setback when he was imprisoned for bank fraud in 1907 after a musician acquaintance of his, Louis Savaget, persuaded him to participate in bank fraud. The series of notes he wrote to the judge petitioning for release, which exaggerated his character and his merits, account for some of the most accurate information on the artist in existence today. It is uncertain whether Rousseau was tricked into participating in the fraud or did so willingly. Whatever the case, he used his reputation of being unworldly as his defense. His friends also backed up his claim, which convinced the authorities, and Rousseau was freed from jail.

Finally the innocence and charm of his works won him the admiration of the leading artists. In 1905 he exhibited his large jungle composition The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope along with Henri Matisse at the first showing of Les Fauves.

On 2 September 1910, whilst in Paris Rousseau died of blood poisoning that resulted from an infected wound in his leg. A few months before his death, he exhibited his final painting The Dream, the largest of his many jungle paintings. The Dream was later much celebrated by the Surrealists, whose art valued surprising juxtapositions and dream-like moods. It is now considered to be Rousseau’s masterpiece.

Despite his extensive network of connections including many artists and dealers, Rousseau never profited from his paintings. The artist offered The Sleeping Gypsy for sale for 200 francs, but his offer was rejected as the painting was considered “too childish”. Now one of the best-loved examples of poster art, this and other works including The Dream and Carnival Evening influenced many artists who came after him.

His work continued to influence other artists, from his friend Pablo Picasso, to Fernand Léger, Max Ernst and the Surrealists. Picasso hosted a dinner in the painter’s honor in 1908, which duly triggered a wave of intellectual interest in Rousseau’s works, and elevated his primitivism to the level of high art.

André Breton, also hailed Rousseau as a ‘proto-Surrealist’ for his art’s absurdist, metaphysical quality, and use of bright colors and clear outlines, anticipating the compositions of Surrealists such as Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico. Endowed with an oddly appealing strangeness that could evoke mystery within the commonplace and the exotic, Rousseau’s oeuvre left an impression on artists of the next generation and beyond.

Ultimately, though, Rousseau’s appeal for Modernists like Picasso lay in the ‘primitive’, untutored nature of his style. “Picasso wanted to draw and paint like a child, and he thought that because of his training at the academy in Spain, he never could,” the French curator Estelle Fresneau explained at the Tate Modern’s Rousseau retrospective in 2005. “So he was impressed by Rousseau because Rousseau’s style was pure. Rousseau never tried what people wanted him to do. Actually, I think that Rousseau was very clever. He was conscious that he was inventing a new way to paint.” Perhaps, then, the father of naive art wasn’t so naive after all.

Originally published at https://tomgurney.substack.com and at https://www.thehistoryofart.org/henri-rousseau/biography/ and it is also featured in our 500-page eBook, The World’s Most Famous Artists, which is currently on sale.