Episode Details

Henri Rousseau is famous for lush, vibrant jungle scenes filled with tigers and oversized flora, yet he never once left France. This episode tells the story of the middle-aged Paris toll collector with no formal training who became the laughing stock of the Salon des Indépendants and was later crowned a genius by Picasso, Matisse and the avant-garde. We begin with a childhood in Laval marked by a father's debt and a seized family home, a small perjury that ended his legal career, and an army stint used as an escape hatch.

From his 1871 appointment as a collector of the octroi, the source of his nickname Le Douanier, to his retirement at 49 on a tiny pension, we explore how he built his jungles from the greenhouses of the Jardin des Plantes, taxidermy at the natural history museum, and children's book illustrations. We examine his flat, methodical technique, the 1905 exhibition that helped name Fauvism, Picasso's 1908 banquet in his honor, and a legacy stretching from Sylvia Plath and Joni Mitchell to Madagascar and a Meta commercial.

• Tiger in a Tropical Storm and the false myth that he saw jungles while fighting in Mexico
• Why Rousseau genuinely believed he was painting in a realistic classical style
• Felix Vallotton's rare early praise calling his work the alpha and omega of painting
• Tropical Forest with Monkeys and the fishing primates as a projection of escape
• Death from gangrene in 1910, a funeral of seven friends, and Apollinaire's duty-free epitaph