In November 1908, a prestigious banquet took place at a painter's studio in Paris, hosted
by Pablo Picasso.
As the evening wore on, Picasso's guests enjoyed music, singing, dancing and drinking as the
guest of honour reveled in the centre stage.
This was a 64-year-old man whose art had now gained him the recognition that he'd longed
for all his life.
His name was Henri Rousseau.
Rousseau remains one of the unlikeliest characters ever to attain artistic greatness.
His personality was naïve and innocent, reflecting his own humble background.
His trusting nature was often exploited by the practical jokers among his friends.
He told hopeless lies about an adventurous youth that never existed.
Despite many difficulties with the technical aspects of painting, the self-taught artist
succeeded in creating a vision that was entirely his own in pictures full of freshness and
vitality.
It was an amazing achievement.
Rousseau was well into middle age before he even began to paint.
He was an old man by the time his work was appreciated by the likes of Picasso.
By then, he could bask in the glory of fame at last.
Henri Rousseau's work was a complete break with academic painting, and it was this that
inspired other artists like Picasso to admire him so much.
Because he broke with academic painting quite unconsciously.
He painted as he wished to and wanted to be recognized as an academic painter.
But his naivety, his style was so outlandish.
It provided delight for all those people who didn't like academic work at the period at
the time.
His painting was an imaginative exercise.
Avant-garde artists were open, were looking for an escape or a way of escape or a clue
as to how to free themselves from the straitjacket of the late renaissance, the academic work.
And here was a man, an artist who was not from Africa, who was not from America.
He was quite clearly an urban, Western man, and yet he didn't see in the way that a Western
civilized renaissance man should be painting.
So I think in that sense, he was alongside all the other influences that were coming
to bear, and he was unique.
Henri Rousseau was born on the 21st of May, 1844, in the modest French town of Laval.
He was the son of an ironmonger, and his family had no interest in the arts.
Later in his life, Rousseau recalled his parents' lack of culture with some bitterness.
But it's likely that they had little time for artistic matters.
Life was hard in Laval.
When Rousseau was nine years old, the family finances collapsed, and his parents left the
town, leaving their son behind at the local boarding school.
Although he showed some promise in music and drawing, when he left school in 1860, it was
to take a humdrum office job.
Three years on, the future artist was still engaged in routine work, and there is no evidence
of any youthful paintings or drawings.
But perhaps the creative spirit was already with him.
In 1863, Rousseau was caught stealing from his employers.
Although it was a small theft, his misdemeanor earned him a month in prison.
Shortly afterwards, he decided to join the French army, a good move for a young man in
search of adventure.
But it is at this stage of Rousseau's life that fact and fiction become blurred.
Rousseau was an ambitious man.
He wanted to be known as a painter.
He capitalized on the fact that people laughed at his work and made fun of him, and perpetuated
rumors like the one he'd been fighting abroad, for example, which he hadn't been doing.
And he suppressed other stories, like the fact that he'd stolen money or been accused
of embezzlement.
He liked to romanticize his life as he romanticized his art.
In his later years, Rousseau loved to describe his adventures as a soldier.
Many of these concerned a tour of duty in Mexico.
In the mid-1860s, the French emperor Napoleon attempted to install an ally as the Mexican
emperor, and Rousseau claimed he had taken part in the fighting that resulted.
He also alleged that his famous paintings of jungle scenes were inspired by what he
had seen abroad.
But it was all fiction.
Rousseau never went anywhere near Mexico.
The untrue was his claim to have fought heroically during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.
Throughout his life, Rousseau was happy to exaggerate his own achievements.
The fundamental difference between what he perceived and what actually took place, or
what actually occurred, reflects a man who really was living in an unreal world.
And when we talk about truths or half-truths or lies, I don't think in terms of only Rousseau
we can apply the same criteria that we would to other people, because his unreal, his half-truth
world was to him real.
Therefore, to talk about it as if it was real wasn't to him a half-truth or a lie.
For all Rousseau's claims about his adventurous life, we know that by 1871 he was settled
into the dull civilian job that would take up most of his life.
After leaving the army, he moved to Paris to work for the French Customs Office at one
of the city gates.
He was now married, and his wife, Clémence, gave birth to seven children.
Sadly, five of them died in infancy.
Rousseau carried on with his mundane working life.
When he eventually became known as an artist, he took the nickname Le Douanier, or Customs
Officer, though his position was never senior enough to qualify him for the title.
With hindsight, there was much to exaggerate.
All through his thirties, the future artist carried on working for the Parisian Customs,
and there is little evidence for any creative work.
But in the early 1880s, Henri Rousseau made the surprising decision to become a painter.
His motivations are unclear, but once he had made his decision, he stuck to it.
In 1884, he secured permission to study the great works of the Louvre.
Though he still worked in his humble day job, he was now convinced of his destiny as a great
artist.
He wasn't really a Customs Officer.
He was employed by the Customs, what we would call the Customs Service, in a very lowly
capacity, really, almost as a sort of doorkeeper.
From what one gathers, he was not regarded as being very capable or able, but rather
likeable, and he was kept on with very light tasks for quite some time.
He got involved and swayed and influenced by certain intellectuals, a writer called
Jarret, for instance, who introduced him to a number of other people, other artists and
intellectuals.
And his make-believe world, which was to him real, convinced him that he really was a genius
and a great artist, and that is what he should be doing.
We cannot be sure when Rousseau first took up painting seriously, but by 1885, he had
rented a studio in Paris's Ampasse du Meurne, and he set about his true vocation.
The following year, he painted this canvas, known as The Carnival Evening, a work that
is now admired for its moody, otherworldly atmosphere, but whose technical failings are
also evident.
The flat central figures appear to have been cut out of a book and pasted onto the canvas.
When the work was first exhibited, it was greeted with a mixture of scorn and hilarity.
Though it was an age when many new artistic visions were coming to the fore, Rousseau's
efforts were seen as little more than the work of a child.
But at least it was exhibited.
In earlier years, a canvas like this could not have secured a public showing.
Traditionally, the official Paris Salon had been the only place where artists could exhibit
their work.
But times were changing.
The Impressionists had reacted against the academic formalism of the Salon with their
own series of exhibitions starting in 1874.
Ten years later, another unofficial showcase was established, the so-called Salon des Indépendants.
Here, artists could exhibit anything they liked.
There was no academic jury to reject their work.
For the painter of this almost amateur image, the Salon des Indépendants was little short
of a gift from God.
In 1886, Rousseau exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants.
And the painting he exhibited was a carnival evening.
And it created an enormous scandal, a scandal of success, if you like.
And he relished this.
He relished the notoriety.
He exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants continually thereafter, except in 89 and on
another occasion.
So it served a very useful focus for him, of course, reasons he could paint, exhibit.
And it kept him in the public eye, and it brought him to the attention of serious artists
who actually enjoyed his work, eventually, like Picasso, Gauguin, and other friends.
Henri Rousseau's introduction to other intellectuals and artists was further emphasized by the
Salon des Indépendants, because here he was being exhibited, or at least introduced to,
the avant-garde.
And this is what he felt he was.
He was part of the avant-garde major, and to be amongst that group, therefore, it seemed
to underlie to him his status within the intellectual artistic community.
Throughout Rousseau's artistic career, he remained loyal to the Salon des Indépendants.
The exhibition itself became the subject for one of his later paintings.
Sadly, many of Rousseau's exhibited works are now lost, and the identity of those that
survive is often obscure.
This forest scene may have been shown at the 1886 Indépendant event, but we can't be sure.
The response to Rousseau's art, however, was damning.
They were ridiculed.
It almost became a ritual at the Salon des Indépendants.
Although Rousseau's work was never located in the prime positions, both critics and public
made a point of visiting the naive paintings of the obscure part-time artist.
Well into his forties, Rousseau still had to put in 70 hours a week at his day job,
but he somehow found the time to carry on painting, still convinced of his own abilities,
and prepared to ignore the mocking of the critics.
By 1890, Henri Rousseau felt able to proclaim his own status as an artist through his first
masterpiece, an image inspired by one of the major events of the artist's life, the great
Parisian World's Fair of 1889.
Henri Rousseau, not unlike other artists at the time, were open to influence from all
sorts of foreign or non-Western influences.
The Foot of the Eiffel Tower is a series of glass exhibition areas in which there were
exciting and exotic, intriguing exhibitions of artifacts and events from Mexico, from
other parts of South America, from different parts of the world.
And it was just a marvelous sort of dream world for him.
This was a huge exhibition to mark the centenary of the French Revolution.
For six months, visitors marveled at the artistic and scientific exhibits contained within the
many glass pavilions of the World's Fair.
Highlights included a reconstructed Mexican palace and many other recreations of life
in exotic lands.
Rousseau loved it.
What he saw at the World's Fair would stay with him for the rest of his life.
Rousseau loved modern technology, the carnival atmosphere of uniforms and flags.
And he actually incorporated certain aspects of it into his paintings.
He did a painting of myself, portrait landscape, and in it he incorporated a hot air balloon
from the World's Fair and flags of different nations.
And he did this painting about a year after he'd been at the World's Fair.
The World's Fair that inspired Rousseau so much finally closed in October 1889.
But we can still see its legacy in the shape of the most famous of all Parisian landmarks,
the Eiffel Tower, constructed for the event.
We can also see this great feat of engineering in the first important work of Henri Rousseau's
career, 1890's My Self-Portrait Landscape.
This was an amateur painter's bold attempt to present himself as a fine artist.
Rousseau believed that his combination of portrait and landscape was entirely original.
And he liked to consider himself the creator of a new artistic genre.
But contemporary critics were unimpressed.
More than ever before, the canvas was greeted with mockery.
It is not difficult to see the picture's technical weaknesses.
The artist's feet are especially unimpressive.
Rousseau would never master the complex spatial planes required to paint feet effectively.
His response would be typically naive.
In his later works, he simply buried his feet in undergrowth.
But despite the flaws of this earlier canvas, it succeeds as a whole in making a powerful
impact upon the viewer.
This painting, My Self-Portrait Landscape, was much admired by Berlin Dada, by Apollinaire's
Circle, and by Robert de Loney as expressing the genius of the people, in other words a
proletariat painting, nothing to do with academia.
They liked its naivety, its renunciation of perspective, and its belief in the artist
as a noble being.
It's a statement.
It's a statement of him.
He's large.
He's larger than anything else.
He's got all the attributes of artists there.
He's making the statement.
He claimed, and the critic talked about it being a sort of landscape and portrait landscapes,
and this appealed to him, and he really felt that he'd actually invented it.
And so he claimed that he invented the portrait landscape.
The portrait landscape that we see today is not the same as the work exhibited in 1890.
The artist later reworked the palette to include two female names, Clemence, his wife, who
died of tuberculosis in 1888, and Josephine, the woman who became the second Madame Rousseau
in 1899.
By that time, Rousseau's art had taken over his life.
He saw little of his surviving children, and in 1893, he was at last able to retire from
the customs gate that may have been the subject for this earlier canvas.
When Rousseau eventually left his day job, he was 49 years old, and his pension was not
enough to provide a comfortable living.
In the years after his retirement, he suffered much in the way of financial hardship, but
he was able to devote himself to his increasingly bold painting.
Even before his retirement, Rousseau's pictures were growing larger in scale and greater in
ambition.
In 1891, he painted this large canvas depicting a tiger taken by surprise in a colorful jungle
setting.
This was the first of many similar scenes of exotic plant and animal life, which may
be the best-known images of the artist's career.
In his jungle paintings, Rousseau was influenced by the Orientalists, also possibly by the
fact that he was rumored to have been abroad in Africa.
What he enjoyed, I think, about the jungle paintings was the way he could let his imagination
run riot.
He actually studied the plants and trees that he showed.
He showed different leaves.
The leaf was the sort of module in these paintings, different kinds of leaves, different plants.
Not in proportion, of course, used as a decorative element.
But he was able to build up a real sense of the overwhelmingness of the jungle.
And the way the animals were partially hidden by the trees, or sometimes people were partially
hidden, helps the sense that we are in a very thickly wooded area and mysterious as well.
And he used about 50 different kinds of green.
Rousseau referred to them as his Mexican paintings, claiming that they were inspired by his foreign
travels as a young man.
In fact, these jungles were inspired by nothing more distant than the hothouses of Paris's
Jardin des Plantes.
Rousseau did not have to travel far to find vegetation to inspire his jungle paintings.
For animals, he didn't need to leave his studio.
After Rousseau's death, it was discovered that he owned a book of animal photographs
entitled Bête Sauvage, The Savage Beasts.
It quickly became clear that for many of his animal figures, he had simply copied the photographs
wholesale.
This is a Rousseau painting from late in the artist's career.
A willingness to borrow compositional elements from other sources was a feature of Rousseau's
approach all through his career.
And he was happy to use mechanical assistance.
We can see this in his first jungle painting.
He can also be identified in this 1892 canvas, The Centenary of Independence.
For the outline of the central figures in this ambitious painting, we know that Rousseau
used a tracing device to take an existing image and transfer it enlarged to the canvas,
a device known as the pantograph.
The pantograph was a simple device, but a very important device, which actually had
a long history, it had been the pantograph for some time, but which could enlarge a small
drawing.
One end of it you could trace on a photograph or a drawing, and then the other end, it would
enlarge it.
For Henri Rousseau, he relied a lot and was excited by lots of illustrations, particularly
photographs of wild beasts and things like that.
And he would be able to use that.
He used that to trace out this so he could enlarge it onto his canvas or paper.
So in practical terms, a pantograph, an enlarging, an instrument for enlarging, was extremely
useful.
He used it a lot.
Rousseau's use of the pantograph might be frowned upon, but it enabled the artist to
concentrate on his strength as a colorist.
Shortly after completing this striking image, he met an individual who appreciated the naive
freshness of his art.
Around 1893, Rousseau became acquainted with the writer Alfred Jarry.
In the years that followed, Jarry encouraged and supported his friend more than anyone
before.
It was Jarry who commissioned the only print that Rousseau ever made, this lithograph depicting
war.
And this small image also inspired the boldest work of the artist's career.
In 1894, this canvas, also entitled War, was revealed to a stunned audience at the Salon
des Indépendants.
This painting was painted in 1894, a year after he'd left his job at the toll gate.
It might reflect some of the problems he'd had leaving his job and becoming an artist.
It was his attempt to enter the academic circle with a subject that was acceptable, traditional,
the horseman of the apocalypse, war and so on.
It's a big painting, one meter by two meters more or less, and it shows this amazing black
horse flying over recumbent dead bodies, arms chopped off and so on.
And in the background you have trees, outlines of trees and an extraordinarily pink cloud
against the blue sky.
So it has conflict in the very composition.
The sky, for example, is peaceful but the horse is very moving and fast and horrific
and then you've got these dead white bodies at the bottom.
So it's a very strong and strange painting.
Rousseau remains one of the most important works of Rousseau's career and it generated
real critical acclaim.
A long article in the Mercure de France described the canvas as the most remarkable painting
of the 1894 Indépendants show.
The sheer originality of the work was praised and Rousseau was delighted.
He was now increasingly confident in his own abilities.
Shortly after the Mercure de France article was printed, Rousseau heard that a Parisian
publisher was planning a book about the best new artists of the age, the so-called painters
of the next century.
Without being asked, he wrote down a summary of his own career and sent it to the publisher
for inclusion.
Though the book was never produced, Rousseau's words have survived.
He describes his hardships dating back to childhood.
He also alludes to his self-teaching as an artist.
He names just three influences on his work, nature itself and two obscure academic painters,
Jérôme and Clément.
To this day, students of Henri Rousseau are fascinated by the sources of his artistic
inspiration.
It may be that his work was so original that we cannot really talk of influences at all.
Rousseau was influenced by Jérôme and Clément, academic artists, possibly also by Géricault's
Raft of the Medusa in the early part of the century.
He was also influenced by the Orientalists, especially of course in his later jungle paintings.
We know that Rousseau admired Lyon Bonnard, a portraitist and teacher whose paintings
were characterized by an often dramatic use of black and white.
Rousseau developed a similar enthusiasm.
His blacks are especially striking as we can see in much of the portrait work that he carried
out in the later 1890s.
Paul Gauguin is said to have admired the intensity of Rousseau's blacks in images like Boy on
the Rocks, completed in 1897, and this earlier portrait of a woman.
This may be Josephine, the artist's second wife, but we may never know for sure.
It was the purchase of this painting that later inspired Picasso to organize the famous
banquet in Rousseau's honor.
Portraiture took up much of Rousseau's time in the later 1890s.
Any commission was valuable given the artist's financial predicament.
He also painted a large body of landscape scenes, such as this View of the Bierve at
Gentile.
Images like this can be seen as technically stronger than Rousseau's portraits, but at
the time they fetched little more than a few centimes for the struggling artist.
Rousseau's landscapes are amongst his most satisfying works.
These are sympathetic images of the suburban environment that the artist knew so well.
They do have weaknesses.
The spatial recession of the road in this 1902 canvas is lacking in conviction, but
as with all the artist's work, the freshness and originality of Rousseau's landscapes
overcame his technical failings.
Rousseau's landscapes are quite charming in a naive kind of way.
He has the texture of the trees very carefully delineated.
The perspective is very personal, and sometimes the relation of the fences and the trees to
the people also is personal.
Sometimes the people are very small, sometimes they're very large.
They're very refreshing, his landscapes.
If we look at the way that he tackles and uses landscape features and plants, they are
each seen individually and uniquely and equally, so that the composition is based upon equal
things which are of equally important scene, equally important defined within the whole.
And he does look.
I mean, he's looking, but he's looking in a different way perhaps than Cezanne.
But I do think that it is the business of looking that's important, and the fact that
he is able to bring together what may seem very disparate things, and that he elaborates
them.
Landscapes like these remain honest images of an environment familiar to the artist,
but Rousseau himself did not place as high a value on his landscapes as he did with his
more imaginative work.
These were pictures that depicted no place on earth, and the most famous of them all
was painted in 1897, the Sleeping Gypsy.
This large canvas can now be seen in New York's Museum of Modern Art, an appropriate location
for a canvas whose sheer modernity remains integral to its appeal.
Rousseau had once described himself as a realist painter, but the 21st century viewer can surely
see more than surrealism in this haunting image.
It remains the most mysterious and influential work of Rousseau's career.
Color, the use of paint, and the dreamlike quality are all elements which are there orchestrated
together.
I find it interesting that the robe of the gypsy reminds me of later 20th century color
work, hard edge abstraction.
Now that isn't consciously, obviously only Rousseau's, but what emerges, quite unconsciously,
is a relationship of color and the use of color concern with color, which really doesn't
come until later on in the 20th century, so I find that fascinating.
On the use of paint, this is not the paint of Van Gogh, that is, of using it as a physical
entity, it is using paint as color, and therefore it is different than, well, Cézanne or Gauguin
as well for that matter, and it's a rather traditional, very traditional effect, it's
the sort of way you apply paint, as you saw in the Sandal paintings or in this country's
Royal Academy of Paintings, but over that, it doesn't get in the way, it only serves
to emphasize this dreamlike quality.
Now, this is something which is indefinable, as far as I'm concerned, that he, with all
these, you can analyze all these bits and pieces, the way he does his, the way fences
are coming, but in the end, it's a reaction to the final work, which I find most eerie,
this is a good example, that it transcends all of those things and becomes something
which floats separately as a supernatural being, so that's my reaction to that.
The Sleeping Gypsy is now recognized as a masterpiece, but initially, it was neglected.
26 years after its completion, it was found lying in a plumber's workshop.
It was not the only Rousseau canvas to suffer such a fate.
In 1944, his amazing War was discovered in a farmer's barn.
Many Rousseau works are still missing today.
We know this because we know the names of the pictures he exhibited each year at the
Salon des Indépendants.
All through his life as an artist, Rousseau remained loyal to the event.
Only in 1899 and 1900 did he not exhibit there.
This is surprising because he was deep in debt by the turn of the century.
But Rousseau remained convinced that he would be recognized as a great artist.
Then all his problems would be solved.
Rousseau had an incredible faith in himself.
Without it, he would not have been able to cope with the continued mocking of many critics.
But Rousseau's was an innocent, almost childlike belief that people soon realized could be
exploited for fun.
Throughout his life as an artist, he was the gullible victim of jokers who exploited his
naivety.
I think Rousseau probably was gullible and naive, but not gullible and naive enough
not to know that people thought he was like this and mocked him or made fun of him.
I think we should feel sympathetic towards him really.
He wanted to become a famous person and he capitalized on his natural gifts in order
to do this.
Towards the end of his life, Rousseau's gullibility led to his involvement in an unfortunate criminal
escapade.
But his continuing problems with money may also have contributed.
In the early years of the new 20th century, he was still in serious debt.
He handed over paintings to pay off small bills and he was forced to take work as a
decorator and music teacher.
The self-taught artist also opened his own teaching studio.
This might seem bizarre, but by 1903, Rousseau could at least point to the occasional successful
canvas.
That year, he sold this enigmatic image of a child for the sum of 300 francs.
To Faked Baby is a picture that reveals the artist's ongoing technical problems.
We can see that Rousseau has by now given up any attempt at the difficult business of
painting feet.
But by the time he created this portrait of Edmund Frank in 1906, his human images were
finding buyers.
More than ever, Rousseau now believed in his status as an artist.
This 1906 canvas confirms his confidence.
Here we see Liberty inviting the artist to exhibit at the 22nd Salon des Indépendants,
an image that celebrates the annual exhibition that Rousseau loved so much.
He still exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants every year, but by the time he created this
image of celebration, he had also become involved with a new avant-garde event, the Salon d'Automne.
It was an important step in his career.
In 1905, he exhibited this canvas depicting a lion attacking an antelope.
His painting of lush vegetation had now reached mastery, and the work was well received by
many critics.
This Rousseau canvas was bought by a dealer for 200 francs.
Though the artist was now in his 60s, he was making new friends among the Parisian avant-garde.
The poet Guillaume Apollinaire became a champion of Rousseau's work, and commissioned this
portrait showing himself alongside his mistress.
Another admirer was the abstract painter Robert de Launay, who used his influence to secure
the commission of the snake charmer, just one of the many jungle scenes to which the
artist now devoted his efforts.
To be surrounded by what might be an ordinary grass, but with immense proportions, or a
sort of rhubarb leaf which was as high as a house appeared to be, part and parcel of
his dream world, the jungle became a symbol for that which was unknown, frightening, exciting,
colorful, full of sounds and fury and silence and all these sorts of things.
Each leaf, each form, is seen as an entity.
By 1908, jungle scenes like this had helped to secure the artist's status among the Parisian
avant-garde.
Rousseau now took to inviting his new friends to social evenings at his home.
Also invited were his neighbors, his students, and ordinary working folk like the greengrocer
Père Junier, the subject of this 1908 canvas.
But of all the new friends that Rousseau made in his early 60s, none were more significant
than a Paris-based Spanish painter who stunned the world with his first great canvas and
would go on to become the greatest artist of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso.
What Picasso and his fellow artists admired in Rousseau's work was the imaginative quality.
The way the artist followed his own intuition and his own feelings so honestly and directly
and was able to produce these paintings that people laughed at but nevertheless went on
producing them was really true to his own vision.
In November 1908, Picasso visited a Parisian junk shop where he discovered this 1896 Rousseau
canvas for sale.
The asking price was just five francs.
A delighted Picasso bought the picture immediately and decided to arrange a great banquet in
celebration.
It was the night when Henri Rousseau's faith in himself was finally rewarded.
In 1908, Picasso was living in a rundown boarding house called Bateau Lavoie where he also had
his studio and it was in his room in this building that he gave a banquet for Rousseau.
Many of Picasso's friends including his mistress Fernande were gathered round the table with
Rousseau and they were waiting for food which actually never arrived so it was a fiasco
to start off with.
But Rousseau was very happy talking about his paintings and himself and everybody else
got drunk on the wine that had already arrived and sardines they had to eat.
I don't really know what to make of this myself, it's gone down in history but nobody else
either seems to know whether Picasso was being truly sincere in fating Rousseau or just having
another party.
The feast took place at Picasso's own studio, there was music, there was singing and there
was dancing.
There was also an element of farce when the host realised that he'd given his caterers
the wrong day to deliver the party food so a number of guests ventured out into the night
to buy any sustenance they could as the merrymaking continued with Rousseau at centre stage.
Late in the evening his friend Apollinaire decided to compose a poem in his honour and
his words of praise have survived to this day.
Glorious painter of our dear republic, your name is the flag of the proud independence
and it is in white marble rested from the pentelic that your features will be sculpted
pride of our age.
Rousseau left Picasso's banquet at dawn.
He was tired but he must have felt an intense sense of pride, all his faith had paid off,
he was now a successful artist but he was still a gullible man and even as he parted
with Picasso he knew that a serious court case was looming against him.
Having been duped by a so-called friend into opening a false bank account, Rousseau faced
a jail sentence for fraud but when the case came to court in January 1909 he escaped with
a suspended sentence.
In the end it was the obvious naivety of his character that saved him and his paintings
were displayed in court as evidence of his childlike simplicity.
Rousseau was free to carry on painting and as he entered his final years it was jungle
scenes that provided the subject matter for his work.
He was now aware of the talents he possessed and it was his skill with colour that pleased
him most.
When one friend came to Rousseau's studio he found the artist at work on one of his
jungle pictures.
The visitor was informed that no less than 22 greens had already been used in the composition
of the painting.
In Rousseau's depictions of nature, forest, landscapes, he's quite a skillful colourist
I would say, not naturalistic but he gets across the effect he wants.
He's quite a brash colourist, not subtle, doesn't indulge in tonalities very much.
I don't think his colour is the most important part of his work, I think it's an element
that adds to the dreamlike, hallucinatory quality of his paintings.
Colour he was excited by.
In the end result of course was that if we take say colour green and foliage and plants,
he managed to get a wide variety, considerable variety of colour, of creation of colour,
of definition.
So it was in that sense, by accident, became very sophisticated, although it wasn't sophisticated,
contradiction in turn.
In 1910 Rousseau knew that he was approaching the end of his life, increasingly ill he decided
to pull together all the strands of his art in one enormous final canvas.
The dream, a remarkable jungle image created by a man who had never seen a jungle in his
life.
Here we can see the atmosphere and mood that characterises Rousseau's greatest work.
It may depict nowhere on earth but as a triumph of the imagination it remains one of the
finest artistic achievements of the 20th century.
When asked about the dream Rousseau said that the woman was asleep on a sofa and imagining
that she was in the jungle which explains why we have a sofa in the middle of the jungle.
The shape of the woman's body is very sinuous and lovely and then in the background just
behind her we have a flute player, a snake charmer in fact, half hidden among the greenery
and in front of the snake charmer there's part of a snake wriggling away and hidden
among the trees, the foliage, there are animals.
It's a charming painting, it is like a dream, it could be Adam and Eve, there's a simplicity
about it which is very sweet.
This huge painting was the final great achievement of Henri Rousseau.
In September 1910 he died in a Parisian hospital, he was 66 years old.
Shortly afterwards he was buried in a tomb with a poem of praise by his famous friend
Apollinaire.
This honour marked the end of an amazing journey by an incredible man.
Well into his middle age the self-taught Rousseau escaped from a life of dull routine to become
a fated member of avant-garde society.
Rousseau believed in himself and virtually alone he established himself as a great artist
of his time.
It was an achievement we can still admire today.
What I admire most about Rousseau is his adherence to his own vision, so he stuck to this and
created a whole persona for himself and an area of art in which he was the one well-known
person.
What I find most important about Henri Rousseau's work is its simplicity, its directness.
I think that in simple terms is what he has contributed.
Free from the sophistication and the controversy of the contemporary society it frees the artist.