Art by Henri Rousseau

Rousseau spent most of his working life as a Paris customs official, earning him the nickname "Le Douanier" (the customs officer), and never once left France, yet he became famous for dense, dreamlike jungle scenes full of tigers, lions, and tropical foliage, all invented from visits to Paris's botanical gardens, taxidermy displays, and printed postcards rather than any direct experience of the tropics. Entirely self-taught, his flat, deliberately naive style was initially mocked by critics and the academic art establishment. Picasso, however, took him seriously early on, and in 1908 hosted a now-legendary banquet in Rousseau's honor at his own studio, a gesture that helped shift how the avant-garde saw him, from amateur curiosity to genuine influence.