Henri Rousseau endured the art-historical misfortune of being a working-class late bloomer—he was a Sunday painter who only began to paint seriously in his 40s—with what seemed to his critics little natural talent. His unsentimental, haunting images nonetheless drew the attention of a literary and artistic coterie hungry for fresh recruits. How did Rousseau, whose style still commands belittling adjectives such as “naive” and “simple,” escape relegation to the margins of art history? It was, as the writer André Malraux has pointed out, the former toll clerk’s friendship with a legion of well-established masters that has by and large guaranteed his place in the history of Modern art. During his lifetime Rousseau became something of a sensation within the relatively small Parisian art scene. His astonishing works were celebrated by Guillaume Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry, and Pablo Picasso, and he came to be considered a major force by artists such as Max Beckmann, Vasily Kandinsky, and Fernand Léger only a few years after his pauper’s death.