Academic sculptures, postcards, a book of wildlife pictures and his lone expeditions to the Jardin des Plantes provided his material.
He began to study at the Art Students League, making academic sculptures (sculptures, he liked to joke, were "drawings you fall over in the dark"); then he supported himself as an art director for silent films.
In those distant days, academic sculpture, seen as kitsch, did not sell easily.
The old clichés about "academic" sculpture in the 19th century are hopelessly inadequate.
Michelangelo's sculptures, in particular, convinced him that the static, smooth, idealized purity of contemporary academic sculpture lacked life and truth.
His works, containing a lively realism, rhythm, and variety that were in opposition to contemporary French academic sculpture, form a prelude to the art of Auguste Rodin, who revered him.
Rodin said, "It is Michelangelo who has freed me from academic sculpture".
And it opens not with Rousseau himself, but with King Kong, or one of his cousins, a huge academic 1887 sculpture by Emmanuel Frémiet of a fearsome gorilla, carrying off a naked maiden.
In contrast to the invulnerable champions of academic art, these sculptures image the hero in distress.
On one side are maudlin academic paintings and sculptures, mostly of Native Americans.
A comprehensive collection of 19th-century French academic painting and sculpture complements works by the better-known artists of the late Romantic and Neoclassical, Realist, Barbizon, Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Divisionist, and Nabi schools.
