At the first exhibition of Henri Rousseau's paintings in 1886, the public laughed out loud, and critics made fun of his original, unschooled style, one writing "Monsieur Rousseau paints with his feet, and his eyes covered."
Despite heavy criticism throughout his life, Rousseau kept painting, confident in his gift. He never received formal training in the arts because his family was too poor. For more than twenty years, he worked at the Paris customs office. It wasn't until the age of 40 that he took up the brush, teaching himself to paint by copying works at the Louvre and studying nature. "Nothing makes me so happy as to observe nature and to paint what I see." he said.
Though his best-known paintings are of jungle scenes with monkeys, lions, and small woods, Rousseau never left France or saw a jungle. To paint foreign plants and animals, he relied on books, botanical gardens(植物园) in Paris, and his imagination. "When I go into the glasshouse and I see the strange plants of faraway lands," he once said, "it seems to me that I enter into a dream."
Rousseau claimed to have invented a new style of painting called the landscape—portrait, in which he paints a background view and then adds a person in the foreground later, as he did in Myself: Portrait-Landscape (1890).
Called a naive (天真) artist due to his childlike, untrained style, Rousseau painted colors one at a time, starting from the top and working his way down. While critics described his works as flat and inexact descriptions of nature, he earned the respect of artists like Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky, who thought Rousseau was onto something new.
Though his work was never accepted by the art world in his time, Rousseau's paintings hang in museums around the world today. And Rousseau's original approach to art has inspired countless artists to follow their own unique views.
