page_title: Henri Rousseau
section_title: Retirement and death
hierarchical_section_title: Henri Rousseau / Biography / Retirement and death
context_page_description: Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French post-impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier, a humorous description of his occupation as a toll and tax collector. He started painting seriously in his early forties; by age 49, he retired from his job to work on his art full-time.
  Ridiculed during his lifetime by critics, he came to be recognized as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality. Rousseau's work exerted an extensive influence on several generations of avant-garde artists.
context_section_description: After Rousseau's retirement in 1893, he supplemented his small pension with part-time jobs and work such as playing a violin in the streets. He also worked briefly at Le petit Journal, where he produced a number of its covers. Rousseau exhibited his final painting, The Dream, in March 1910, at the Salon des Independants.
  In the same month Rousseau suffered a phlegmon in his leg, one which he ignored. In August, when he was admitted to the Necker Hospital in Paris where his son had died, he was found to have gangrene in his leg. After an operation, he died from a blood clot on 2 September 1910.
  At his funeral, seven friends stood at his grave: the painters Paul Signac and Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, the artist couple Robert Delaunay and Sonia Terk, the sculptor Brâncuși, Rousseau's landlord Armand Queval, and Guillaume Apollinaire who wrote the epitaph Brâncuși put on the tombstone:
  We salute you Gentle Rousseau you can hear us.
  
  Delaunay, his wife, Monsieur Queval and myself.
  
  Let our luggage pass duty free through the gates of heaven.
  
  We will bring you brushes paints and canvas.
  
  That you may spend your sacred leisure in the
  
  light and Truth of Painting.
  
  As you once did my portrait facing the stars, lion and the gypsy.
caption: The Dream (1910), MoMA
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