Meet Henri Rousseau, the Untrained Artist Who Wouldn’t Quit Painting—Despite the Ridicule He Received From Critics

A new retrospective at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia examines the career of the 19th- and 20th-century French painter, who toiled in obscurity for most of his life

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

October 22, 2025

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

In 1893, a French toll worker named Henri Rousseau quit his job to pursue painting. The untrained artist produced imaginative portraits, landscapes and jungle scenes, submitting them to Paris’ prestigious salons. They’d eventually be lauded by the art world—but first, they bombed.

“Rousseau had terrible things said about him in the press,” curator Nancy Ireson, deputy director for collections and exhibitions at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, tells WHYY’s Peter Crimmins. “Journalists said that he painted with his feet, with his eyes closed. They called him all sorts of things. He didn’t sell his works.”

But Rousseau kept painting until his death in 1910. And in the following decades, his reputation improved. In 1923, American collector Albert C. Barnes acquired a Rousseau painting for 45,000 francs—about the price of a piece by Henri Matisse or Pablo Picasso, reports the Art Newspaper’s Hannah McGivern.

A new exhibition called “Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets,” now on view at the Barnes Foundation, examines the artist’s enigmatic career. Co-curated by Ireson and Christopher Green, an art historian at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, the show boasts 55 paintings and one lithograph. More than half of these pieces belong to the two largest collections of his work: the Barnes Foundation (which has 18 Rousseau artworks) and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris (which has 11).

Born in Laval, France, in 1844, Rousseau spent most of his life working in the French civil service as a tariff collector. His position earned him the nickname “Le Douanier” (“the customs officer”). After retiring early, he supported his art career on a modest pension, according to a statement from the Barnes Foundation.

“I never saw such poverty as I saw in Rousseau’s studio,” the artist Max Weber, an early patron of Rousseau’s, once said, per the Art Newspaper. Rousseau was frequently in financial and legal trouble. He was convicted of embezzling in his early years, and he was indebted and imprisoned in middle age for bank fraud. During the trial, Rousseau’s art was used as evidence of his innocence.

“The advocate who spoke for him held up one of his pictures in the court and said, ‘Could somebody who painted a picture like this really have known what a check was?’” Green tells WHYY.

Rousseau’s “unique vision” is best exemplified by his jungle paintings, per the statement. Though the artist never left France, he was inspired by plants and taxidermy animals in Paris’ gardens and natural history museums. Resulting scenes like Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo (1908) are “vivid, lush and often unsettling in the exoticism of the imaginary worlds they portray,” according to the museum.

Rousseau’s portrayals of less exotic subjects also convey his imaginative style. Père Junier’s Cart (1908), for example, depicts a group of people riding in a horse-drawn cart above an oversize black dog. When Weber suggested the dog was too large for the composition, Rousseau replied that his composition required a dog of these dimensions.

“It’s just extraordinary, the chutzpah of the man. The complete refusal ever to be discouraged,” Green tells WHYY. “It can only come from a faith in what he was doing.”

“Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets” also sheds light on the artist’s technical processes. Conservators at the Barnes Foundation performed an in-depth study of their Rousseau canvases between 2021 and 2024. They found five underlying paintings beneath works, eight reworked compositions and five instances of changed dates.

“A lot of Rousseau’s secrets will never be known,” Green tells the Art Newspaper. Still, the new research revealed “some incredible discoveries.”

Rousseau’s tendency to reuse canvases and alter paintings to please clients betrays his struggle to survive as an artist. He “had real ambitions to earn a living from his work,” Green tells the Art Newspaper. “Ultimately, he failed. But he made extraordinary work while trying to do so.”

“Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets” is on view at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia through February 22, 2026.

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.