Henri Rousseau the artist was mostly self-taught, and his work reflected his absence of formal education, with its disregard for accurate proportion, one-point perspective, and utilization of vivid, sometimes garish colors.As a consequence of these characteristics, an oeuvre filled with a feeling of mystique and strangeness emerged.
His origins as an artist are unknown, however, he claimed to have started painting at the age of 40, which coincides with the period he got permission to copy artworks from the Louvre.
In 1908, Uhde staged Rousseau’s first solo show, which was a failure. Pablo Picasso bought Portrait of a Woman (1895) from a secondhand shop that same year.
Rousseau’s output made an enduring effect on painters of the following generation and beyond, gifted with an inexplicably alluring strangeness that could elicit wonder among the mundane and exotic.