"Rousseau walks on trumpet paths," Joni Mitchell sings against a gauntlet of Burundi drums in "The Jungle Line".

Henri Rousseau, "the very-good-very-bad painter", remains enigmatic nearly a century after his death. He is the not-quite-post-impressionist who always requires an explanatory sidebar of his own. All his life he felt he didn't fit in, probably because he didn't, until Picasso threw a rowdy party for him that enthroned him as "the master". His fellow artists were being facetious, but they genuinely loved the way he rubbed the high-brow art world's noses in his garish palette.

The funniest thing was, "the Douanier" really did believe his paintings were realistic. �The hungry lion throws itself on the antelope, devours him," he trilled about one of his jungle scenes, enrapt by its frightening authenticity. "Birds of prey have each torn a strip of flesh from the poor animal that is shedding a tear! The sun sets.�

And to Picasso, at the end of the soon-to-be-legendary Banquette Rousseau, he pronounced tearily, "You and I are the greatest painters of our time, you in the Egyptian style, I in the modern.� Onlookers sniggered at the audacity, but Le Douanier knew what they did not yet know, that his spirited jungle had been colonised by a race of people who walked sideways and spoke in hieroglyphics.

It's been said, oversimplistically but sympathetically, that "he didn�t know the rules well enough to break them". But of course there are no rules in the kingdom of the imagination.

Further browsing:
The photographs used here, including the painting images, came from the Tate Modern's excellent online exhibit, and the painting images from Artchive, Ibiblio.com and Artcyclopedia.com
The Dream of Henri Rousseau is one devotee's engaging website, with links to a collection of hi-res painting images.
Text sources include Encyclopedia Britannica, the New Yorker and Artchive. There's a clever thesis here by Princeton undergraduate Ben Shechet on the Douanier's aims and influences that suggests the big cats in his paintings may be him.
The website of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris is here.
My blog version of this post is here.
An interesting film to look out for, should it go on general release, is the documentary produced by the US National Gallery of Art for the 2006 exhibition "Jungles of Paris", a show mounted by the Tate Modern and Mus�e d�Orsay. Narrated by Kevin Kline, it features archival and present-day footage of the Parisian parks, gardens and greenhouses that fuelled Rousseau�s imagination.

JUNE 2008 EDIT: A thankyou to Chaterton for clarifying the mystery of the missing "Rue Perrel" in Placemark #36 and pointing out that Rousseau's final studio still exists and is open for visits on Rue Alain adjacent to Square Cardinal Wyszynski.