His savoir faire remains as enigmatic as his name itself. It is no wonder that Le Douanier Rousseau has continued to intrigue, but at the same time irritate, many art enthusiasts, who have been attracted by his paintings, for well over a century now.

Born in 1844 in the town of Laval in France, Henri Julien Felix Rousseau would start working in the customs department in Paris, after finishing his law studies. With no formal education in art, he began painting only in his late 30s; “pushed by the spirits”, as he would describe the reason for his entry into the world of creativity.

Although he signed his works with his real name, the sobriquet Le Douanier, (or the Customs Officer), would stick to his reputation forever.

Ridiculed during his life, Henri Julien Felix Rousseau came to be recognised as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality

Rousseau’s early paintings were the result of his daily walks at lunchtime in le Jardin des Plantes, a garden close to the office where he worked. Here he saw trees, leaves, grass, and flowers not like everyone else but in minute detail, as if they were all placed under an imaginary microscope before his eyes. These impulsive visuals also miraculously transformed the ants, butterflies, and lizards that he observed in the garden, into the wild beasts, snakes, and eagles of his world of fantasies. When he returned home after work, he painted the strange scenes on canvases but was too afraid to show them to anyone.

It was in his early 40s, that he started sending his paintings to galleries and art exhibitions. They were generally rejected as ‘childish’, and it was only in 1891, nearly at the age of 50, that he received his first appreciation by art critics as well as by established painters such as Paul Signac, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin and Toulouse Lautrec who recognised his style as  ‘Naïve, or Primitive manner’.

This impulsive childishness remained Rousseau’s driving force during his lifetime. When he encountered a group of soldiers who had returned from Mexico, he listened to their accounts with amazement. He then created a whole set of tableaux showing lions and tigers that in reality do not exist in the Mexican forests.

By the early 20th century, one of Rousseau’s admirers turned out to be a young Spanish painter named Pablo Picasso, who bought many of his works. They eventually became close friends and in a letter to Picasso, Rousseau wrote: “We two are the greatest painters of our time. While your style is related to the Egyptian antiquities, mine is enlightenment for postmodernism.”

One particularity of the artist’s style is the amazing frigidity of the characters in his paintings. The football players are not playing but posing before him. In his single or group portraits, men and women are seen staring into the eye of the beholder, and in the forest scenes, wild animals appear more interested in pinning down a prey than in killing, or devouring it. In the words of famous French art critic André Breton, “Nothing in the paintings of Rousseau is real. Everything is happening in real time.”

Not only Pablo Picasso, but also other contemporaries, such as Otto Dix and Diego Rivera, would be indelibly marked by Rousseau’s style and Picasso would paint his famous ‘Maya & her doll’ in 1938 as homage to Rousseau, nearly 30 years after his death.

Despite his reputation as a highly controversial artist, Rousseau lived and worked in extreme poverty and was able to sell some of his works only a few years before his death in 1910 at the age of 66.

The Musée d’Orsay of Paris is currently paying a belated tribute to Rousseau, in an exhibition that began in March and would last until the middle of July.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris: ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, May 8th, 2016