Rousseau was born to a poor family. His father’s debts even caused the family to lose their home at one point. Rousseau served in the army for four years before going on to become a customs officer at the edge of Paris. He worked until he was 49, painting on the weekends, until he could retire and focus fully on his art. He taught painting lessons, performed as a street musician, and did other odd tasks to earn enough money to live as he painted.
He was completely self-taught and this showed in his work. He wanted to paint flawless, realistic works but a naivety, a simplicity, persisted that he couldn’t shake. The traditionalist painters mocked him but he remained confident in his talent.
Rousseau’s favorite subject was the jungle but he never actually saw a jungle. He based his scenery on the botanical gardens in Paris and the animals were drawn from guide books and zoo pamphlets. Some of his subjects he never saw in three dimensions so his paintings have a flat look to them. Also, Rousseau sometimes grouped together animals that would never be seen together in nature. In one painting, the bananas hang upside down from a tree.
There were some who liked Rousseau’s paintings. For example, Picasso saw one of Rousseau’s paintings being sold on the street as a junk canvas that could be painted over by a serious artist. Picasso bought the painting and then went to meet this ingenious artist.
After his death in 1910, Rousseau began to gain popularity and now his canvases hang in museums around the world.
[The paintings shown above are The Sleeping Gypsy, Surprised!, and Tropical Forest with Monkeys.]
EDITED TO ADD: Create Your Own Rousseau Jungle
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In 1884 he began his best known piece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (shown at the beginning of this post). He finally finished it in 1886, two years later. This painting is now on display at the Art Institute of Chicago and has been since 1926. It is a massive piece of about 10 feet wide by 6 feet tall and is worth the trip. If you do get the chance to see the painting up close, notice that there is a shadow in the distant trees that looks like someone lurking. Also look closely at the skirt of the woman with the monkey. In person, you can see that Seurat made the skirt larger after the painting was finished. This painting is a great example of why it’s important and preferable to view original paintings than photos of paintings on glossy pages.
Seurat lived a short life which ended in 1891 when he was just 31 years old. He had two sons, one of whom was born after Seurat’s death. Nothing is known of the children. 
Seurat studied art briefly at Ecole de Beaux-Arts. When he moved to Paris in 1880 he decided that before he complicated things with color, he would master the art of black and white drawing. You can find these black and white sketches scattered around the world. Seurat did many black and white studies for his large paintings, as well. Shown below is a study for La Grade Jatte. Notice this woman fishing on the left hand side of the painting, shown above.
In the 1800s, a lot of research was done on color. This research was extremely scientific and only scientists could understand the studies. A group of writers were able to interpret the research and make it clear to others, including painters. The color wheel was designed around this time which shows how different colors blend. This new information was of great interest to Seurat who experimented with the idea of color blending not on the palette or canvas but in the eye.
If you really want to be correct when talking about Seurat’s style, you should call it “chromoluminarism” or “divisionism” rather than the better known “pointillism.” It is true that Seurat formed images using many tiny dots of paint (pointillism) but really he was trying to achieve something even more difficult. To color a tree using dots of many different shades of brown is a far easier thing to do than choosing white, red, and yellow and arranging many dots in such a way that the colors blend in the viewer’s eye to create brown. La Grande Jatte is really an astonishing achievement.
