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Henri Julien Félix Rousseau (May 21, 1844 - September 2, 1910) was a self-taught late 19th century French painter and the most famous artist of the Naïve School.

He was born in the town of Laval in the Loire Valley region of France. His father was a plumber who lacked the means to pay for his son to study art, even though the young Henri excelled at drawing in school. When his father fell into debt and lost his business in 1851 Henri was placed in a boarding school, working for a lawyer after graduation. He soon left his job however and enlisted in the French army in 1863, where he remained until 1868. He never saw active duty, despite his declarations of having served in Mexico.

On leaving the army, Rousseau moved to Paris to be near his newly widowed mother. He found a job as a toll collector with the French Customs office, a job that would later give him the nickname "Le Douanier" (the customs officer). In Paris Henri also met his future wife, Clémence Boitard, whom he married in 1871 and with whom he had nine children. Two of the children died as babies and Clémence herself died of tuberculosis in 1888. He remarried eleven years later but his second wife, Josephine Noury, died in 1903 just four years after their marriage, leaving Henri heartbroken.

Henri's job with the French Customs left him with plenty of free time and he started painting seriously when he was in his early forties. It is thought that he was encouraged to paint by his neighbor, the artist Felix Clement. He was entirely self-taught although he later admitted to having received advice from some established Academic artists.

Rousseau was permitted to make copies of classic masterpieces in the Louvre. The same year, he submitted some works to the official Salon, but his works were rejected. He had no idea about perspective and, to the jury, his paintings looked unsophisticated. In 1886 he exhibited at the Salon des Independants, an alternative art show for avant-garde artists. This Salon did not have a selection jury or official admission procedure, requiring only an entrance fee for inclusion in. Rousseau would exhibit his paintings there every year until he died.

The Salon marked the beginning of Rousseau's professional career as an artist and in 1893 he retired from the Customs office on a small pension in order to devote himself to painting full time, supplementing his income by giving violin lessons and working as a street musician.

Rousseau produced an impressive body of work enjoyed by a European art public attuned to exoticism. The first of his jungle landscapes, Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) , which he showed publicly in 1891, was well received as was The Sleeping Gypsy of 1897. The art critics however did not agree and ridiculed him publicly, calling the bright colors and flat perspective the work of an amateur. Rousseau himself was undaunted and continued to believe in his abilities. He was proud of his lack of formal training, and said that he had "no teacher other than nature."

During the early 1900s he developed his jungle theme, producing Scouts Attacked by a Tiger (1904) and The Hungry Lion (1905) which drew the attention of fashionable society, including Pablo Picasso and the writer Guillaume Apollinaire. In fact, Rousseau had never actually seen a jungle. He drew inspiration from the Paris Botanical Gardens and the Zoo. His bananas were painted growing upside down and he brought animals from different continents together in the same painting, but the works expressed genuine emotion and this is what brought his art to the attention of his peers.

In 1908 Pablo Picasso held a banquet in Rousseau's honor. It was part serious and part travesty, but it was attended by many of the great avant-garde artists of the day and Rousseau was thrilled to be taken seriously, or so he believed, by such prominent society.

Henri Rousseau died in Paris in September, 1910. His funeral was attended by the Parisian avant-garde art community. Apollinaire wrote a poem as his epitaph and the sculptor Brancusi produced his tombstone. The art dealer Ambroise Vollard had acquired many of Rousseau's works and exhibited them posthumously at the Salon des Independents in 1911.

You can find a large collection of Henri Rousseau patterns to use with SegPlayPC™  here.

A group of High School students in Utah made a giant replica of Vincent van Gogh's famous painting Starry Night, but this replica is unique. It's made out of – breakfast cereal!

Doyle Geddes, the Sky View High School's art teacher, was in charge of the project, which was intended to help his students relate better to art. The replica measures 6,400 square feet and must be the first ever to have used up two tons of Malt-O-Meal instead of paint. The artwork was used as pig feed after being taken down.

Artists don't usually hang their paintings in a museum as a protest, but that is exactly what French painter Pascal Guerineau did. The middle-aged artist entered the world-famous Louvre museum on a busy Sunday afternoon and, after having checked to see there were no security guards about, he hung one of his own paintings on the wall between masterpieces by Prudhon and Gericault. Museum guards did not notice that there was a new painting hanging on the wall till the next day, when they promptly took it down.

The painting is called The Forgotten and Guerineau hung it in the Louvre to protest the French museum system which, he claims, does not give young artists an opportunity to show their works. "Museums are cemeteries for artists" said Guerineau in an interview. The Louvre declined to comment and has not yet returned Guerineau's painting which prompted the artist to say that perhaps they did not think it was so bad after all.

Henri Rousseau once told Picasso "We are the two greatest painters of this era: you in the Egyptian style and I in the modern style."

Two hundred and eleven of Pablo Picasso's works have sold for more than $1 million each.

Henri Matisse was a lawyer's clerk before deciding to study art in Paris.