Rousseau was a tinsmith's son and received no education. He worked in a solicitor's office then in a Paris Customs office. When called up he told the authorities that he had taken part in the Mexican campaign of 1861-1867. Towards the age of forty, and self-taught, he devoted himself to painting, having retired from the Customs service. The academic painters, especially Bouguereau, were his ideal. He made a living by giving all sorts of lessons (painting, sight-reading, elocution elocution). His first daughter was taken from him on the death of his first wife; he also lost his second wife in 1903. He took part in the 1886 Salon des Independants. Maximilien Luce was the first to take notice of him: Signac, Pissarro and Redon recognised his talent. In 1893 he met the playwright Jarry. The year after his exhibition at the Independants in 1905, his work was discovered by Picasso, Delaunay, Apollinaire and Vlaminck. In 1908 they organised a banquet, since famous, in his honour at Picasso's. His reputation was made. In 1919 he was unjustly implicated in a case of bank fraud. In the following year The Dream was displayed at the Independants. He died in the Hopital Necker and was buried in a common grave. Having begun with naSève landscape paintings, he finally achieved an individual style in La Bohemienne endormie (1896); he later treated exotic and dreamlike subjects. Le Lion affame, exhibited at the first Fauvist exhibition of 1905, aroused great interest. Both Cubists and Surrealists appreciated the purity of his style, and the Blaue Reiter group in Munich referred to him as "the master". Yet
many people poked fun at him; his pictures provoked "explosions of laughter "; nevertheless his splendidly pure style probably influenced Gauguin by prompting him to abandon Impressionism. Rousseau's art was Gauguin's erudite art in popular form, and answered the fundamental requirements of Synthetism. His flat yet rather decorative technique, his escapism into the exotic, and his poetic imagination created a strangely magical reality. His example encouraged many Sunday painters and drew attention to naive art. The scrupulousness of Rousseau the artisan never contradicted the realist vocation of Rousseau the artist; the result, however, can hardly be called realist. Le Douanier, the insignificant employee in shabby retirement, was more one of the "people" than the" proletariat"; but he adored art, worshipping it through the work of successful artists who had gained the entree into high society, ambitious to become one of them. Hence he thought in genres, following the example set by the accepted realist masters. He saw himself in turn as a painter of portraits (Pierre Loti, The Poet and his Muse, none other than Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin),of flowers and landscapes (Vue de SaintCloud, Malakoff, the exquisite Paysage avec Promenade de chien), of allegories (War, The French Republic), family occasions (The Country Wedding), and exoticcompositions (Tiger hunt, La Bohemienne
endormie, La Charmeuse de Serpents).

Post-Impressionism, Michel-Claude Jalard, Edito Service SA, Geneva