Creator story
Surprising fact
Rousseau painted lush tropical jungles without ever leaving France — he studied plants in Paris botanical gardens and the zoo.
Source: Wikipedia / WikimediaSymbolism
Henri Rousseau
Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) was the self-taught naïve painter of dreamlike jungles and exotic beasts. A humble toll collector, he was mocked in his lifetime but adored by Picasso and the avant-garde.
Rousseau's bold, untrained vision helped legitimise naïve and outsider art within modernism.
- A self-taught painter who never had formal training.
- Painted exotic jungles he had only seen in Paris gardens and books.
- Championed by Picasso, who threw a famous banquet in his honour.
Key works
Two works that open the world of Henri Rousseau
These works make it easiest to see how the artist changed form, content, and the very way art could exist in culture.
1910
The Dream
In The Dream, Henri Rousseau makes the structure, scale, and logic of symbolism especially legible.
1897
The Sleeping Gypsy
The Sleeping Gypsy is an 1897 oil on canvas painting by the French Naïve artist Henri Rousseau (1844–1910). It is a fantastical depiction of a lion musing over a sleeping woman on a moonlit night. It is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, to which it was donated by Olga Guggenheim in 1939.