Artist of the week: Henri Rousseau

This week in Year 3 we are introducing a new artist, Henri Rousseau. Do you know who he is and why is he a famous painter? 

Let´s get to know him a little bit better.

Rousseau was born in France in May 1844 and died in September 1910. He was a late painter, he started painting seriously in his early 40s and it was not until the age of 50 that his dedication to art was full-time.

But what is most amazing about Henri Rousseau is that he was never taught by anyone, he learnt on his own. Self-taught, he was inspired by nature and he thus developed a very personal style. His portraits and landscapes were like dreams, not reality due to the way he used colours, perspective, anatomy, a non- realistic scale and ambiguous spaces. Rousseau sometimes added features he had seen in museums, books or magazines and then transformed them in his paintings. If you take a closer look at his paintings, human figures or wild animals have a jungle like appearance.

His first painting was Tiger in a Tropical Storm (1891), but there are many other significant pieces like the Hungry Lion throws itself to the Antelope (1905) or The Dream (1910) which have brought fame to Henri Rousseau.

Although during his lifetime his art wasn´t recognised by many and in some cases people laughed at his work because they thought it was childish, Henri Rousseau has since influenced several generations of artists such as Pablo Picasso or the Surrealists.