Major Works

Many great masters of the time were awed at this common working man who had no formal training in the arts who painted and managed to produce work that was comparable with theirs. When asked on his training, he would often reply that “nature was his only teacher” and he stood by those words through out his artistic career. His roots have him ridiculed almost through his whole career, but many a master saw the genius in his work and admired him for his tenacity in getting his dreams. One of his works of art features scenes from jungles and forests that seem to have been taken from scenery of such places only to be proven later that inspiration was very much nearer home that others might have thought. He is said to have gained knowledge of how they looked at from zoos and pictures that he found in his daughter’s books and other local materials. The fact of the matter is that the artist never left France and based all his work from tales told him by war friends of far away lands filled with exotic animals and plants.

Due to much criticism and ridicule by many of the art critics of the time, he presented his work in the Salon des Independants where such ridicule was void and anyone can display works of art for a fee. Many critics attack his work with such ridicule as to say that they were done by a child and that he didn’t even know what he was doing that he tried most to overcome. He never did and this was not to deter him from his passionate work that he carried on till he died. Another unique method of painting that he did was working from back to foreground, meaning he painted the sky first then worked on the background then placed his subject. This only fueled critics who aimed to discredit his as much they could, but to no avail. His work even suffers from seemingly flawed painting procedures that can be seen as cracks and other imperfections. These defects can also be found in the works of great masters such as Picasso and Matisse and can be attributed to his meager budgetary resources that had him using only student grade paint instead of the best ones money could buy.