Henri Rousseau was a self-taught French painter who worked as a toll collector for the Paris customs service until his retirement — earning him the nickname Le Douanier, "the customs officer." He began painting seriously in his early forties, submitting work to the Salon des Indépendants from 1886 onward, where it was often met with ridicule from critics who found his naive style primitive and technically deficient. Picasso, Apollinaire, and other avant-garde figures recognized something altogether different in his work and championed him; today his distinctive vision is understood as one of the founding expressions of naïve art and a significant influence on twentieth-century modernism.
