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His nickname, “Le Douanier,” refers to his old job as a customs official.

Popular Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra and crew spent a week spray-painting his homage to the Douanier Rousseau, combining the motif from the great French post-Impressionist’s painting Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope with his work The Dream.

Ever since Picasso feted the Douanier Rousseau, modern art has sought to embrace alternative talent.

Gompertz began as a Tate curator, retrained as a standup comedian, and now presents arts programmes on the dumbed-down BBC; given this career path, it's unsurprising to find him calling Le Douanier Rousseau "the Susan Boyle of his day".

“Bah!” says another and older hand, “pass the effects of Monsieur;” and our countryman—whose cheeks had begun to redden under the stares of his fellow-travellers—is allowed to depart with his half-worn tooth-brush, while the discomfited douanier gives a mighty shrug at the strange habits of those “whose insular position excludes them from the march of continental ideas.”