Apes in the Orange Grove

Rousseau painted these apes in 1910, the last year of his life, and like all his jungles it was grown entirely in Paris. He had never left France. A retired toll collector who taught himself to paint, he built his forests from afternoons in the city's botanical garden and menagerie, from illustrated magazines, and from sheer patience, layering leaf over leaf until the canvas thickened into an impossible orange grove full of watching monkeys. By this point the young avant-garde around Picasso and the poet Apollinaire had taken up the older man as one of their own. He died that September, at 66, of an infected leg, with pictures like this one still drying in his room.