Biography:
He 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.[1] He worked for a lawyer and studied law, but "attempted a small perjury and sought refuge in the army,"[2] 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, Clémence Boitard, who became his first wife and he wrote a waltz bearing her name. They went on to have 9 children but tuberculosis was rife at the time and 7 died at an early age. [1] 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.[3] 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, Félix Auguste-Clément and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Essentially he was self-taught and is considered to be a naive or primitive painter.

painting gallery
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his work:
His best known paintings depict jungle scenes, even though he never left France or saw a jungle. Stories spread by admirers that his army service included the French expeditionary force to Mexico are unfounded. His inspiration came from illustrated books and the botanical gardens in Paris, as well as tableaux of "taxidermified" wild animals. He had also met soldiers, during his term of service, who had survived the French expedition to Mexico and listened to their stories of the subtropical country they had encountered. To the critic Arsène Alexandre, he described his frequent visits to the Jardin des Plantes: "When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream."

Along with his exotic scenes there was a concurrent output of smaller topographical images of the city and its suburbs.

He claimed to have invented a new genre of portrait landscape, which he achieved by starting a painting with a view such as a favourite part of the city, and then depicting a person in the foreground.

He painted in layers — starting with a sky in the background and ending with animals or people in the foreground. The rain in Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) of 1891 (National Gallery, London) is achieved in an innovative way with thin light grey strands of paint slanting across the canvas with a glaze or varnish. The effect was influenced by the artist's "lifelong admiration for the satiny finishes of Bouguereau".[3]

When Rousseau painted jungles he could use over 50 varieties of green. Although derived from nature, his foliage is adapted to his artistic needs and is often not recognisable as being made up of particular plants.

When painting, Rousseau would do one color at a time, doing all of one color, then going on to another one; etc.

He worked on each painting for a considerable length of time and consequently his œuvre is not extensive. Rousseau used a student grade of paint because of his financial limitations. In some paintings certain areas of overpainting, e.g. foreground foliage, are now badly cracked, due to incorrect technical procedure (although this is not uncommon in oil painting and can be seen in works by Matisse and Picasso).