Henri Rousseau

Henri Rousseau collected tolls on goods entering Paris, which earned him the nickname Le Douanier, and taught himself to paint, only working full-time from his late forties. Critics mocked the flat, meticulous pictures he showed at the Salon des Indépendants, but younger artists admired them, and Picasso held a banquet in his honour in 1908. His famous jungles came from visits to the Paris botanical garden and zoo, not from travel: he never left France.