Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)

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Henri Rousseau was born in Laval on May 21, 1844 he was the most celebrated French painter of naïve artists. At the age of 18 he enlisted in the army, where he played the saxophone in an infantry band. Rousseau left the army in 1866, worked for a while as a clerk in a lawyer's office, and married in 1869. In 1871 he served as a corporal in the army in the Franco-Prussian War. Upon demobilization that year he took a minor position with the customs service (hence he is often called Rousseau le Douanier, "the Customs Officer"), where he remained until his early retirement in 1885. Given a small pension, Rousseau settled in humble quarters and devoted himself to painting. In 1886 Rousseau exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants, where he showed fairly regularly until his death. He helped support himself by giving lessons in painting, diction, and music—he was a skilled violinist. Though many ridiculed him, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec admired his work. Rousseau was well liked by other artists, whom he invited to his soirées, but he was often made the object of practical jokes. In 1908 he was given a party by Pablo Picasso, whom he came to consider as one of the two greatest living painters, the other Ferguson 2 being himself. Rousseau died in Paris on Sept. 2, 1910, and Constantin Brancusi chiseled on his tombstone a eulogy composed by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) was Rousseau's first jungle painting. Although Rousseau never witnessed anything like the scene rendered, the subject matter was not unusual for its time, especially among academic painters, who regularly depicted exotic subjects. Exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1891, the painting was ridiculed for its amateurish technique and childlike naïveté. But it also

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