‘Here one evening in the year 1908 unrolled the pageantry of the first and last banquet offered by his admirers to the painter Henri Rousseau called the Douanier.’ The carefully sonorous words are those of the poet André Salmon, one of the artists and writers who was present that night at Le Bateau-Lavoir, the shabby, subdivided former piano factory towards the top of the hill of Montmartre that was home to Picasso. The Spaniard played host and the other attendees were part of the ‘bande à Picasso’, among them Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Max Jacob, the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and the American patrons Leo and Gertrude Stein.

This was a beggars’ banquet rather than a luxurious affair. Picasso was then still trying to find his way in Paris and was living in some squalor but had gathered around him assorted aspiring avant-gardists. According to legend, he had come across one of Rousseau’s paintings at a street stall, a canvas being sold for reuse, and struck by its naïve force decided to track down the artist. The less colourful version is that Apollinaire introduced the two men.

There has long been a suspicion that the evening was organised as an elaborate joke, with the idea of setting up Rousseau to be the butt of the younger artists’ faux homage. He was placed on a rudimentary throne, in a room decorated with flags and a banner inscribed ‘Honneur à Rousseau’ and feted with toasts and poems. At one point, increasingly bibulous, he threw himself into the proceedings, took out his violin and played a waltz. As he left the party Rousseau informed Picasso: ‘We are the two greatest painters of the time, you in the Egyptian style and I in the modern.’

There was little evidence to support Rousseau’s confidence. Indeed, the critics claimed that he painted with his feet or with his eyes closed – or they simply laughed. What Picasso and his friends saw as a fresh and childlike vision untarnished by academic conventions, the wider public, if they came across his work at all, saw as merely inept. Rousseau (1844-1910) is now established as an important oddity, an outlier of the Modernist experiments of the first decades of the 20^th century. The wonderful gathering of more than 50 of his paintings at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (the exhibition will travel to the Museé d’Orangerie in Paris on 25 March 2026) is an opportunity to experience him as both his supporters and detractors once did.

Apollinaire was not always an unequivocal admirer and summed him up pithily and not inaccurately: ‘This autodidact has undeniable natural qualities… But, on the other hand, Rousseau lacks general knowledge. One shouldn’t get carried away by his ingenuity. One feels its hazardous, and even its ridiculous aspects.’ Because he turned to painting professionally only in the last 17 years of his life he missed out on a proper training. Despite his admiration for Jean-Léon Gérôme, the ultimate academic painter and darling of the Salon – the official showcase of French art – Rousseau was essentially self-taught. His simple style, more folk art than high art, was the result not just of his instincts but of rudimentary skills.

His late ambition to be a painter came after a series of undistinguished former careers. Initially, Rousseau worked for a local lawyer in his home town of Laval in western France, but when he was caught pilfering from his employer he volunteered for the army in an attempt to avoid jail. He appeared in uniform in the dock and got off with just a month’s imprisonment. He proved an undistinguished soldier, did not see action, and when his father died in 1868 and he was allowed to leave the service he grabbed the chance. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, as the son of a widow, Rousseau avoided conscription and did not volunteer to return to his regiment. His nickname, ‘Douanier’, came as a result of landing a civil service job at the Octroi, the body that imposed tolls and taxes on goods entering Paris. The position brought stability, a pension and subsided housing, but, again, he failed to progress.

Despite his commitment to becoming a painter, Rousseau found little more success there either. The most he ever made for a painting was 400 francs (roughly £1,700) but was never afraid to adapt his pictures to what he thought would sell. Although he showed his work at the Salon des Indépendants – a catch-all exhibition forum for unofficial artists – initially at least his clients were neighbours or local tradespeople: his A Walk in the Forest (c. 1886), for example, was bartered with a laundress in exchange for clean shirts (according to one neighbour he was so poor he didn’t even own bedsheets).

The Barnes survey shows the full range of his output, and his strengths and limitations. Early canvases such as Carnival Evening (1886) and Rendezvous in the Forest (1889) are enigmatic scenes of lovers in parks or bowers – gentle, romantic and quaintly picaresque. He would quickly move on to portraying single figures dwarfed by richly foliated backgrounds, a genre he called ‘portrait-landscapes’ and claimed to have invented. He tried his hand in three competitions for civic pictures for town halls, and unsurprisingly (his entries are clumsy and maladroit) came nowhere. He gave allegory a go too, with War (c. 1894) depicting a terrifying female figure on a flying horse – the spiritual descendant of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Dulle Griet (1563) – leaping over a battlefield of dead and crow-pecked bodies: it is a startling image with memories of what the painter had seen in Paris with the brutal suppression of the Commune.

In search of new buyers, he painted The Football Players (1908) in response to the growing popularity of rugby, which had been introduced as an Olympic sport at the Paris games of 1900, and a series of ‘small pictures for small homes’ – suburban parks and fishing lakes, villas, shops and the light-industrial buildings of the urban fringes. In many of these works, Apollinaire’s ‘ridiculous aspects’ are everywhere apparent: dogs at a mismatched scale with the lugubrious faces of old men, stilted figures more marionette than human, skewed perspectives, and buildings and boats that resemble toys. What remains unclear is whether or not Rousseau was aiming for a more conventional form of realism but simply lacked the capabilities to achieve it or whether his vision and style were synchronous.

The real point of Rousseau, however, lies in his jungle paintings. The Jardin des Plantes in Paris, which also contained a zoo, drew him back frequently. ‘When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream,’ he said. Again, responding to the taste for thrilling tales of savage nature, the tropics and wild animal encounters, he produced a series of large and bizarre pictures that drew on a variety of sources – taxidermied animals, Penny Dreadful stories, animalier sculptures, wild man of the woods legends and travellers tales. In the pictures, surrounded by an impenetrable screen of fronds, leaves and grasses, tigers attack buffalo, monkeys sit as placidly as any Parisian bourgeois family having their portrait made, an American Indian grapples with a gorilla, a leopard goes for the throat of a man, and in the National Galley’s Surprised! (1891), a tiger stalks two hunters, figures Rousseau subsequently painted out.

The exhibition includes his two most important paintings, The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) and The Snake Charmer (1907), both rich in possible interpretations and pictures that profoundly intrigued the Surrealists-to-be. Rousseau described The Sleeping Gypsy baldly as: ‘A wandering Negress, a mandolin player, lies with her jar beside her (a vase with drinking water), overcome by fatigue in a deep sleep. A lion chances to pass by, picks up her scent yet does not devour her. There is a moonlight effect, very poetic. The scene is set in a completely arid desert. The gypsy is dressed in oriental costume.’ The Snake Charmer meanwhile is equally baffling; a nocturne that shows a flute-playing black woman draped in snakes by the banks of a river. What do they mean? Both pictures have the atmosphere of a dream, both imply a narrative, both seem emanations of the subconscious and redolent of the Symbolist poets, but neither has either a clear source or an explanation.

Such works brought Rousseau attention but not real money and in 1907 he overstepped the law again. He became involved in a bank fraud, opening an account under a false identity to obtain cheques and attempting to withdraw 21,000 francs. He was quickly discovered. At his arrest a report stated that: ‘His morals and his integrity are highly dubious but he isn’t known to have relations with men. He only receives relatively frequent visits, at home, from different women with whom he has unions.’ The defence, using a gambit Rousseau must have found deeply uncomfortable, argued that the simplicity of his paintings was evidence that he was an innocent who had been misled or indeed even a little touched in the head (Apollinaire claimed that the painter had both tried to shoot a ghost that haunted him, and claimed to have witnessed a soul leaving a body). Rousseau was given a suspended sentence, but suspicions remained that he was considerably more knowing than he let on.

Rousseau died alone, an alcoholic, two years after the Picasso banquet, and was buried in a communal cemetery. The fame he had tried hard to win arrived posthumously, in part thanks to French painter Robert Delaunay, who brought Rousseau’s paintings and promoted his art in avant-garde circles. Younger artists from Magritte (an unspoken presence throughout the exhibition) and Max Beckmann to the Blue Rider group and Fernand Léger, were among those indebted to Delaunay, described simply as this ‘little chap with a soft black hat’.

Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets runs at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia until 22 February, 2026 and at the Museé d’Orangerie, Paris from 25 March, 2026.