The Dream, by Henri Rousseau Cushion

This 100% cotton, 20" x 20" American MoJo throw pillow features a superb example of the unconventional 19th century painter Henri Rousseau. Product design by Joseph Maas About the artist: Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier (the customs officer), a humourous description of his occupation as a toll collector. Ridiculed during his life, he came to be recognised as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality. His best known paintings depict jungle scenes, even though he never left France or saw a jungle. Stories spread by admirers that his army service included the French expeditionary force to Mexico are unfounded. His inspiration came from illustrated books and the botanical gardens in Paris, as well as tableaux of taxidermied wild animals. He had also met soldiers, during his term of service, who had survived the French expedition to Mexico and listened to their stories of the subtropical country they had encountered. To the critic Arsène Alexandre, he described his frequent visits to the Jardin des Plantes: "When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream."