Henri Julien Felix Rousseau only became a full-time artist late in life - at the age of forty-nine - after retiring from his job at the Paris customs office. Rousseau - or ‘Le Douanier’ (‘the toll collector’) as he was nicknamed - was a self-taught painter who found himself dismissed and ridiculed for his unusual compositions and ‘naive’ style. Yet, he was admired by painters like Picasso and Kandinsky who believed that the simplicity of his approach revealed new artistic possibilities. Rousseau’s best-known works are lush and vivid jungle scenes, which were inspired by trips to the Paris gardens and zoo - the artist himself reportedly never left France.