The Lush World of Henri Rousseau

He was a Paris toll collector who taught himself to paint, never left France, and was laughed at by the critics for most of his life, though he liked to let people believe he had seen the jungle as a soldier in Mexico. Henri Rousseau’s jungles were in fact dreamt up in the hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes and the pages of illustrated magazines. Today they are among the best-loved pictures in modern art, and in 1908 Picasso threw a banquet in his honour. Here are seven, from the moonlit Carnival Evening of 1886, one of the first pictures he ever exhibited, to the storm-lashed tiger of 1891, The Sleeping Gypsy and the great jungles of his last years.

Each print comes with the story of its own painting. For the whole strange tale of the man himself, read our Rousseau article.