La Jungle De Henri Rousseau

A child's biography of French artist Henri Rousseau, who spent his life as a toll collector, but created unheralded masterpieces in his spare time.

In this delightful introduction of to the art of Henri Rousseau, children explore a tropical jungle while they learn about the colors and themes that make the artist's paintings masterpieces of deceptive simplicity.

"Rousseau painted his famous series of jungle pictures late in life. From 1872 to 1893 he had worked as a customs officer in Paris and only started painting when he was forty. Throughout his career as a painter, Rousseau's subjects were almost exclusively the streets, bridges, and public squares of his beloved Paris. In the last ten years of his life, however, he produced his jungle pictures, which proved to be the greatest of his achievements." "Where does Rousseau rank among painters of the late 19th century? Was his work really naive? Were his jungle paintings merely decorative? How did he measure up in terms of the young painters who discovered him, especially Fernand Leger? This book answers these questions by going beyond a study of Henri Rousseau's life and work by placing them in a greater art historical context."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Publisher description

In these colourful and vibrant works, monkeys play among tropical flowers, tigers stalk their next meal, and mysterious figures lure the viewer into this exotic, captivating world.

Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) never visited the tropics or saw a jungle in real life, anymore than he studied the wild animals he painted in their natural habitat. Rousseau's jungle paintings were the fantasies of a city dweller, constructed from visits to the Botanical Gardens in Paris, from books and from his vivid imagination. Nevertheless they have struck a chord with succeeding generations of viewers, offering a dream of escape from banal reality to an exotic and savage realm. In this beautiful miniature gift book the jungle paintings are reproduced in all their full, jewel-like colour, along with details highlighting the intricacy of the painter's extraordinary vision, and a brief explanatory text. A perfect and affordable introduction to the unique world of Henri Rousseau.