Henri Rousseau is best known for his naive paintings. Born in 1884, he belonged to the Impressionists' generation, but his artistic achievements and vision thrust his work well beyond that into the future of painting. Rousseau's genius was recognized only toward the end of his life, when he was discovered by a young, dynamic generation of artists, most notably Pablo Picasso. Throughout his career, Rousseau's subjects were almost exclusively the streets, bridges and public squares of his beloved Paris. The greatest of his achievements occurred in the last 10 years of his life, however, when he produced his series of jungle pictures. With these paintings, he went beyond the limits of his environment, dreaming of distant, exotic worlds, of wild animals and plants that he had never seen. In the centuries-old history of exotic themes in painting, there is nothing comparable to the works of Henri Rousseau. "Henri Rousseau: Dreams of the Jungle" evaluates the artist's standing among painters of the late 19th century: Was his work really naive? Were his jungle paintings merely decorative? Where did he rank in terms of the young painters who discovered him, especially Fernand Leger? This book answers all these questions by placing Henri Rousseau's life and work in a broad art historical context.