Henri Rousseau

Henri Rousseau spent most of his working life as a toll collector for the city of Paris, checking carts and goods at the gates for a tax the French called octroi. He didn't start painting seriously until his forties, taught himself entirely, and only retired from the toll booth at 49 to paint full time. Critics mocked his flat perspective and stiff figures for years, and Rousseau kept exhibiting anyway at the Salon des Independants, the show that took anyone who paid the entry fee.

His jungle scenes, dense with lions, monkeys, and oversized leaves, were never based on travel. Rousseau built them instead from visits to the botanical gardens and the zoo in Paris, and from picture books, working the plants up into tangles no real jungle quite matches.

The turn in his fortune came in 1908, when a young Pablo Picasso spotted one of Rousseau's paintings being sold on a Paris street as a used canvas, cheap enough to paint over. Picasso recognized what he was looking at and sought Rousseau out, later throwing him a banquet at his studio in the Bateau-Lavoir, part tribute and part elaborate joke that Rousseau, by most accounts, took entirely at face value.