Henri Rousseau

FRENCH PAINTER, perhaps the most famous of all Naive artists. Rousseau came from a poor hackground and he went through a succession of menial jobs, before turning to art late in life. Among other things he was a clerk, a soldier and a toll-collector. While working as the latter, he began painting as a hobby and, in 1893, he took early retirement, in order to pursue his artistic ambitions.

Rousseau was entirely self-taught, although he did take advice from academic artists such as Clément and Gérome. He copied many of the individual elements in his pictures from book illustrations, using a mechanical device called a pantograph. But it was his dreamlike comhination of images and his intuitive sense of colour which gave his art its unique appeal.

Rousseau began exhibiting his paintings from the mid-1880s, using avant-garde bodies such as the Salon des Indépendants, for the simple reason that they had no selection committee. He never achieved great success, but his guileless personality won him many friends in the art world, among them Picasso, Apollinaire and Delaunay. Posthumously, his work was an important influence on the Surrealists.

Excerpt from Art. The World of Art, from Aboriginal to American Pop, Renaissance Masters to Postmodernism.