Henri Rousseau inspired Toucans

Henri Rousseau was born on May 21, 1844, in Laval, France.He was a self taught french artist. While working as a toll collector in Paris, he taught himself to paint and exhibited his work almost annually.Rousseau had begun to paint in his spare time. He never had a formal art education; instead, he taught himself by copying paintings in the art museums of Paris and by sketching in ...the city's botanical gardens and natural history museums.

He always feels “Nature is the best teacher”. Essentially he was self-taught and is considered to be a naive or primitive painter.

 His best known paintings depict jungle scenes, even though he never left France or saw a jungle.His painting inspiration came from illustrated jungle books and botanical gardens in Paris. Henri Rousseau believed that his work was done in an academic style, although he was most widely seen as a professional for his creative style, and the unique ability to take something out of the page of a magazine, and recreate it into a unique and distinct picture. He was brought into the lime light in 1908, during the banquet in which Picasso introduced him to the art world. Styliization, the fantastical images, and direct vision, were some of the features which the art world loved, when viewing the images which Henri Rousseau created during his career. 
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