Landschaft mit Ruinen

Rousseau painted this small landscape in 1906, in his early sixties, after a working life as a modest customs official on the edge of Paris. He was self-taught and worked in his spare hours, and the salon critics still treated him as an amateur to laugh at. As its title says, it sets ruins in a calm, ordered countryside, built up in the flat, clear layers he used for everything, with every leaf and stone given the same even attention. The whole picture is barely the size of a sheet of writing paper. Only in his last years did younger painters such as Picasso begin to collect his work and take it seriously.