French 1844-1910 Henri Rousseau Locations He was born in Laval in the Loire Valley into the family of a plumber. He attended Laval High School as a day student and then as a boarder, after his father became a debtor and his parents had to leave the town upon the seizure of their house. He was mediocre in some subjects at the high school but won prizes for drawing and music. He worked for a lawyer and studied law, but "attempted a small perjury and sought refuge in the army," serving for four years, starting in 1863. With his father's death, Rousseau moved to Paris in 1868 to support his widowed mother as a government employee. In 1871, he was promoted to the toll collector's office in Paris as a tax collector. He started painting seriously in his early forties, and by age 49 he retired from his job to work on his art. His wife died in 1888 and he later remarried. Rousseau claimed he had "no teacher other than nature", although he admitted he had received "some advice" from two established Academic painters, Felix Auguste-Clement and Jean-Leon Gerome. Essentially he was self-taught and is considered to be a naive or primitive painter.  Related Paintings of Henri Rousseau :. | The Fisherman | The Promenade | Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin with Poet's Narcissus | Bouquet of Flowers | View of the Bridge at Sevres and Saint-Cloud with Airplane,Balloon,and Dirigible |
Related Artists:
George Shuklin
painted Pyotr Drozhdin in 1745
Vyacheslav Schwarz
painted The Spring Pilgrimage of the Tsarina, under Tsar Aleksy Mihailovich in 1868
Leutze, Emmanuel Gottlieb
German-born American Romantic Painter, 1816-1868