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Rousseau was born in Laval, Mayenne, France, in 1844 into the family of a tinsmith. He was a mediocre student, and he left the secondary school in Laval without having completed his studies. He soon entered military service, in which he remained for four years.

During his term of service he met soldiers who had survived the French expedition to Mexico (1862–65) in support of Emperor Maximilian, and he listened with fascination to their recollections. Their descriptions of the subtropical country were doubtless the first inspiration for the exotic landscapes that later became one of his major themes. The vividness of Rousseau’s portrayals of jungle scenes led to the popular conception, which Rousseau never refuted, that he traveled to Mexico. In fact, he never left France.

Released from military service upon the death of his father (to support his widowed mother), Rousseau settled in 1868 in Paris. In 1868, he married Clémence Boitard, his landlord’s 15-year-old daughter, with whom he had six children (only one survived). In 1871, he was appointed as a collector of the octroi of Paris, collecting taxes on goods entering Paris. His wife died in 1888 and he married Josephine Noury in 1898.

In Paris he began a career as a petty official, eventually (in 1871) becoming a tax collector in the Paris toll office; from this post came the name by which he was well known in later years, le Douanier (“the Customs Officer”), in spite of the fact that the toll office had no real customs functions.

Working as a bureaucrat and busy with family affairs, he still somehow found time to draw and paint. The picture with which Rousseau made his debut at the Salon des Indépendants, Carnival Evening (1886), was a masterpiece of its kind and an impressive beginning for the artist. From 1886, he exhibited regularly in the Salon des Indépendants, and, although his work was not placed prominently, it drew an increasing following over the years.

His wife, who had been ill for some time, died in 1888, and within several years he lost all of his family except for a daughter, whom he sent to live with relatives. This period of personal hardship was also a period of increased artistic activity for Rousseau. An important event in his life at this time was the Universal Exposition held in Paris in 1889; it is probable that the reconstructions of Senegalese, Tonkinese, and Tahitian landscapes at the exposition provided further inspiration for the exoticism of his later paintings. The most important work of this period in Rousseau’s career is his self-portrait, Myself: Portrait-Landscape (1890). Standing in the foreground, palette in hand, Rousseau is surrounded by the Parisian landscape, which is painted with great accuracy. This was obviously intended as a “portrait of the artist” in the academic tradition; the seriousness of purpose is impressive in spite of the naiveté of execution.

Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) was exhibited in 1891, and Rousseau received his first serious review when the young artist Félix Vallotton wrote: “His tiger surprising its prey ought not to be missed; it’s the alpha and omega of painting.” Yet it was more than a decade before Rousseau returned to depicting his vision of jungles.

In 1893 Rousseau retired from the toll house to devote himself entirely to painting and moved to a studio in Montparnasse where he lived and worked until his death in 1910. Soon afterward he met Alfred Jarry, a brilliant young writer, also from Laval, whose nonconformity shocked his contemporaries. Jarry was struck by Rousseau’s unusual work and introduced the self-taught artist to the circle of intellectuals associated with the avant-garde review Le Mercure de France. It was this review that first published an article praising Rousseau. The article was written in connection with his painting The War (1894), exhibited at the 1894 Salon des Indépendants, which demonstrated a striking use of allegory, convincing some viewers that Rousseau was much more than a minor landscapist. This work marked the beginning of the recognition of Rousseau as a serious painter.

His most important painting of this period was The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), in which he portrayed a woman asleep in a moonlit desert with a huge lion standing over her, seemingly transfixed. In 1905 Rousseau was invited to the Salon d’Automne (a semiofficial exhibition created after a schism among the academicians), where his painting The Hungry Lion (1905) was hung in the same room as the works of the group of avant-garde painters known as the Fauves (“Wild Beasts”)—Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck. At last the critics began to speak of Rousseau in a positive light. Ambroise Vollard, the most important dealer in modern paintings in Paris, bought pictures from him. In what is now seen as the first showing of The Fauves. Rousseau’s painting may even have influenced the naming of the Fauves.

In 1907, he was commissioned by artist Robert Delaunay’s mother, Berthe, Comtesse de Delaunay, to paint The Snake Charmer.

During his last years Rousseau painted chiefly exotic landscapes, of which The Hungry Lion was the first major example. The paintings are characterized by a profusion of exotic plant growth painted with great attention to detail. The many different leaf forms that Rousseau depicted were probably based on plants that he studied at the botanical garden in Paris. He rendered each leaf separately yet with an eye toward overall design; each branch of leaves constitutes an almost abstract pattern. In the midst of this vegetal density, colourful birds flit about and mysterious animals stare out at the viewer. There is usually some dramatic incident taking place in the centre, such as a lion attacking its prey, which is in keeping with Rousseau’s continued predilection toward the grandiose, historical, dramatic narratives of traditional academic painting.

Shortly before his death, Rousseau painted the most ambitious of these jungle paintings, The Dream (1910; also called Yadivigha’s Dream), which was also one of his greatest works. Exhibited in March 1910, at the Salon des Independants. In this impressive fantasy, an enchanting nude rests on a red plush Victorian sofa in the middle of a dense jungle. Huge flowers wave about her head, two lions and an elephant peer out of the undergrowth, and a musician plays a flute behind her. Rousseau’s explanation of this scene is that the woman, having fallen asleep on the sofa, dreams that she is transported to this improbable region. This painting, which exhibits all of Rousseau’s descriptive and expressive skill, is a supreme revelation of his powerful and uncommon imagination.

In the same month Rousseau suffered a phlegmon in his leg, one which he ignored. In August, when he was admitted to the Necker Hospital in Paris where his son had died, he was found to have gangrene in his leg. After an operation, he died from a blood clot on 2 September 1910.

Rousseau’s work exerted an extensive influence on several generations of avant-garde artists, including Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger, Max Beckmann, and the Surrealists.

Since 1998 the record price for a Rousseau painting at auction is $2,882,500 USD for Heureux quator, sold at Christie’s New York in 2009.