There are two possible ways to define when naive art originated. One of them is to say that it happened when naive art was accepted for the first time as an artistic mode of status equal to any other artistic mode and we refer to the first years of the 20th century. 

The other is to see naive art as art in itself, and look back on human prehistory, at a time when all art was naive: thousands of years ago, when the first the rock drawings were recorded and when the first cave paintings of bears and other animals were made.

The first naive art, within the rural world, was inspired by the creative imagination of artisans living in a relatively autarchic environment. This art disappeared when the Industrial Revolution began, but later it was revalued by the romanticism and nationalist claims of the nineteenth century.

The naive art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, is very different from the one that existed before and was very close to urban uprooting because he longed for the idyllic nature that had been lost from a nostalgic view of the past. I looked for its biblical, mythological, exotic, legendary, dreamlike and surreal origins.