The makers of the #Madagascar series, consulted the paintings of artist #HenriRousseau for inspiration for the movie's sprawling jungles and leavy trees. Here is a #funwithfundas thread on this strange French painter who died #OnThisDay in 1910. (1/n) 
Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was born in 1844 in Laval, a market town in northwest France. His work is said to belong to the Naïve or Primitive style. The 1870s and 80s saw an #Impressionist wave in Europe. Rousseau's #art moves in a new brisk direction from impressionist roots.
Rousseau took painting pretty later on in his life, in his forties. At 49, he retired from his job as a customs clerk on the outskirts of the city to paint full-time. He was known by the nickname Le Douanier or customs officer for the same reason.
What's a good painting if it doesn't stir something in you? Rousseau's moment of frozen action in Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised) is striking in its angled composition. With the prey out of the frame, Rousseau shows you the stunned beast.
Though his works were thought of as primitive and dismissed by critics of the time, they are held in high regard now. Rousseau is recognized as a self-taught painter who influenced the avant-garde artists who succeeded him.
Naïve or naïf art, is simple, unaffected and unsophisticated – usually specifically refers to art made by artists who have had no formal training in an art school or academy and who reject conventional expertise in the depiction of real objects.
This painter of exotic locales never left France, nor had seen a jungle. His paintings were the concoctions of a city dweller, shaped by visits to the botanical gardens, the zoo, as well as images of distant lands seen in books and magazines.
Rousseau’s style allowed the animators of Madagascar to digitally simplify the complex jungle. Look at the foliage in this painting The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope to understand this.
#SylviaPlath's poem #Snakecharmer is based on this painting of Rousseau's. @MuseeOrsay has described the painting as 'a black Eve in a disquieting Garden of Eden.'
Probably his most famous work, #TheSleepingGypsy depicts a desert night under the Moon, with a lion musing over a sleeping gypsy woman. Notice how the moonlight shimmers on this fantastical landscape!
Here you see Homer as Henri Rousseau's sleeping gypsy in a dream of his in @TheSimpsons episode #MomAndPopArt.
The tiger is a recurring motif in Rousseau's work, along with the circle. Compare this painting Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo, with Tiger in a Tropical Storm that we have encountered.
Here is a screenshot from the 1998 animated feature #KirikouAndTheSorceress. Rousseau has inspired hundreds of junglescapes since.
This was Rousseau's last painting to be exhibited. It is titled The Dream or Le Rêve. It features his Polish mistress Yadwigha and might have been inspired by #ÉmileZola's novel Le Rêve.
He suffered an infection in his leg, which he ignored. A few months later, he was found to have gangrene. After an operation, the wild Naïve artist died from a blood clot #OnThisDay 110 years ago. Towards the end of his life, his work found acceptance outside the establishment.
He was championed by a younger generation of artists and writers, including Guillaume Apollinaire (whose epitaph you see on Rousseau's tombstone), and #PabloPicasso.
