Henri sat at his desk in the Paris toll office, stamping documents and collecting taxes.
It was 1886. He was 42 years old, a clerk checking shipments coming into Paris. His father had been a tinsmith. Henri had grown up poor, worked his way up to this modest government job. 📋
Except in his spare time, Henri painted. 🖼️
He had no training. Never been to art school. He’d taught himself by copying paintings at the Louvre on his days off.
At 42, Henri Rousseau decided to show his work publicly at the Salon des Indépendants. His painting showed two figures in a moonlit winter landscape. Strange. Flat. Wrong proportions. 🌙
Critics laughed. The public laughed. This government clerk painted like a child. 😂
Henri didn’t care. He kept painting. Kept exhibiting. Kept believing.
In 1891, he painted Surprised! A tiger in a jungle during a storm. 🐅
The problem? Henri had never seen a jungle. Never left France. Never traveled anywhere tropical.
His jungles came from Paris botanical gardens. Stuffed animals in museums. Illustrations in books. His imagination. Fantastical landscapes that existed nowhere but in his mind. 🌴
Critics wrote that he painted with his feet. That his work was laughable. 🚫
In 1893, at 49, he took early retirement. His pension was tiny. He gave violin lessons. Played music on the street for coins. And kept painting his impossible jungles. 🎻
Then young avant-garde artists began noticing. 👀
In 1907, Pablo Picasso found one of Rousseau’s paintings in a junk shop being sold as a canvas to paint over. Picasso bought it immediately. 🖼️
In 1908, Picasso threw a banquet in Rousseau’s honor, inviting all the important figures of the Parisian avant-garde. They sat Henri on a throne beneath his painting. 🍷
Was it sincere? Was it mockery? Nobody knows. 🤷
At one point, Henri told Picasso: “We are the two greatest painters of the time. You in the Egyptian style, and I in the modern.” 💬
The guests thought it was absurd. This untrained toll collector comparing himself to Picasso. But Henri was completely serious.
In September 1910, Henri Rousseau died alone in a hospital at 66. Only seven people attended his funeral. 🕊️
After his death, something remarkable happened. ✨
The avant-garde artists began to truly appreciate what he’d done. Retrospectives across Europe. Kandinsky, the Surrealists, all acknowledged their debt to Rousseau. That dreamlike quality, that childlike vision had opened up new possibilities. 🎨
Today, Henri Rousseau is considered one of the founders of modern naive art. His jungle scenes hang in the greatest museums. In 2023, one of his paintings sold for $43.5 million. 💰
The toll collector they laughed at became one of the most important artists of his era.
All because he painted his dreams like they were real. 🌙
Based on the true story of Henri Rousseau (1844-1910)
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