Henri Rousseau (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Henri Julien F lix Rousseau was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naive or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier, a humorous description of his occupation as a tax collector. Ridiculed during his life, he came to be recognized as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality. Henri Rousseau was born in Laval, France in the Loire Valley into the family of a tinsmith. 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