Rousseau Henri Julien Felix (Rousseau Henri Julien Felix)

(1844-1910), known as the customs official (Le Douanier)
Born May 20, 1844 in Laval. On the years of his youth, almost nothing is known. Probably, he served some time as a regimental musician in the French army in Mexico City, then held a minor post in the tax. In 1885 he resigned and took up painting. Rousseau was a self-taught, his works are now primitive art. Inspired by the master in the early period of his works were popular images, with their simple and bright colors and an abundance of detail. Gradually Rousseau perfected his original artistic method; monumental figure and perfect possession of pictorial technique soon took him far beyond the primitive. Much of the paintings belonging to the late works of Rousseau, - is exotic landscapes, fantastic images of the jungle. His attention is focused mainly on inventing, composing pictures, rather than using the impressions of nature, that had enormous significance for further development of painting at a time when there was a rejection of Impressionism. In a large composition Son (1910, New York, a collection of Janice) a combination of real and imagined space and time, anticipating the experiments of Surrealism. Rousseau has created several literary works - melodrama, full of the same naive fantasy, as his paintings. Rousseau died in Paris on September 4, 1910.