Henri Julien Félix Rousseau (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ʁi ʒyljɑ̃ feliks ruso]) (May 21, 1844 – September 2, 1910) was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier (the customs officer), a humorous description of his occupation as a toll collector. Ridiculed during his life, he came to be recognized as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality.
Henri Rousseau was born in Laval, France in 1844 in the Loire Valley into the family of a tinsmith. He attended Laval High School as a day student and then as a boarder, after his father became a debtor and his parents had to leave the town upon the seizure of their house. He was mediocre in some subjects at the high school but won prizes for drawing and music. He worked for a lawyer and studied law, but "attempted a small perjury and sought refuge in the army," serving for four years, starting in 1863. With his father's death, Rousseau moved to Paris in 1868 to support his widowed mother as a government employee. In 1868, he married Clémence Boitard, his landlord's 15 year-old daughter, with whom he had six children (only one survived). In 1871, he was appointed as a collector of the octroi tax on goods entering Paris. His wife died in 1888 and he married Josephine Noury in 1898. He started painting seriously in his early forties, and by age 49 he retired from his job to work on his art full time.
Plot
On safari in British East Africa in September 1910, ten year old Indiana Jones befriends a Massai boy named Meto who helps him in his search for the little seen Fringe-Eared Oryx for former US President Teddy Roosevelt. From there on he and his family and tutor travel to Paris, France where Indy meets a young Norman Rockwell and gets involved in a quarrel between the painters Edgar Degas and Pablo Picasso. The young American boys get a fascinating insight into modern art as Picasso schemes to one up the old master Degas.
Anna Jones: [arriving in Paris] The first thing I'm going to do is to buy a new dress.::Miss Helen Seymour: The first thing I intend to do is take a deep, relaxing bath. [Anna sighs]::Henry 'Indiana' Jones, Jr.: Yeah, well, the first thing I wanna do, is go right to the top of the Eiffel tower.
Anna Jones: An old friend of your father's invited us to visit the wine country, one of the finest vineyards in France.
Miss Helen Seymour: I should have loved to see mister Picasso hoist with his own petard. He's such an imputend rogue.
Henry Jones, Sr.: [to Indy] And now I suppose you think you know all about art?
Plot
Already in his childhood, Pablo Picasso show talent for painting and is sent to the Academy of Arts in Madrid. He becomes a painter but has to live in Paris in poverty. But one day he is discovered by a rich American millionaire and starts to earn money. But he wastes his talent by painting plates. He meets the famous people of the 1920s: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Appolinaire, Hitler and Churchill.
Keywords: art, fictional-biography, hitler, pablo-picasso, painter, slapstick
Tusen kärleksfulla lögner av Hans Alfredson och Tage Danielsson
Gertrude Stein: [to Alice B. Toklas] Alice, Be Talkless!
Elsa Beskow: [on Picasso's painting depicting a hideous version of a woman] And that was the birth of monsterism.
Don Jose: Pablo. Tu est genial! Genial!
Superintendant: This rotten french bastard has tried to rape our pure, virgin american people with his dirty fucking pictures.::Elsa Beskow: ["translates" into Swedish] This unpleasent french gentleman has tried to seduce the nice american people with his unpleasent french paintings.