Henri Rousseau valuation
Paris customs clerk who taught himself to paint, and painted jungles he knew from the botanical gardens.
Henri Rousseau was born at Laval in 1844 and worked as a toll collector for the Paris municipal customs, the octroi, which earned him the nickname Le Douanier.
What a work by Henri Rousseau is worth
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Bio
Henri Rousseau was born at Laval in 1844 and worked as a toll collector for the Paris municipal customs, the octroi, which earned him the nickname Le Douanier. Self-taught, he began exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants in 1886 and showed there almost every year until his death, mocked by critics and admired by the avant-garde. His jungle pictures, with tigers, lions and dense, flat foliage, were drawn from visits to the Jardin des Plantes and from illustrated magazines rather than from travel. Picasso held a banquet in his honour at the Bateau-Lavoir in 1908. He died in Paris in 1910.
Rousseau's output was small and much of it is in museums, so authentic paintings rarely appear, while imitations and misattributions are common; he has been faked since the 1910s. A documented provenance, ideally back to the dealers and collectors who handled him early, such as Ambroise Vollard and Wilhelm Uhde, and inclusion in the literature on him are essential. Small landscapes of the Paris suburbs make up much of what does surface.
Surprised!, The Dream and Wilhelm Uhde
His first jungle picture, Surprised!, of 1891, is in the National Gallery in London. The Sleeping Gypsy, of 1897, and The Dream, shown at the Indépendants in 1910, the year he died, are both in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The collector Wilhelm Uhde gave him his first solo exhibition in 1908 and published the first book about him in 1911.
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