Eva im Garten Eden

By 1908, when Rousseau made this Eve, the younger artists of Paris had adopted him as a kind of hero. That same year Picasso and his circle held a now-famous banquet in his honour at their ramshackle studio building, half tribute and half amusement at this earnest, self-taught man in his sixties. For his Garden of Eden he does what he always did, growing a dense wall of leaves that no botanist could name and setting his figure inside it. Eve stands pale among the greenery, one hand raised, while the serpent winds through the branches nearby. He gives the oldest story in the Bible the same flat, patient clarity as his tigers and lilies, every leaf outlined in its place. He would be dead within two years, his reputation still rising.