Bouquet of Flowers

Rousseau spent much of his life as a minor toll official in Paris, which is why people called him the Douanier, the customs man. He was self-taught, painted in the evenings, and became famous for dense green jungles he'd invented from the hothouses of the botanical garden, having never left France. This is something much quieter: a vase of cut flowers on a table, set against a dark ground, the blooms flattened and carefully outlined the way he saw everything. It dates from around 1910, the year he died in Paris, poor and about 66. By then the young avant-garde had adopted him. Picasso had thrown a half-serious banquet in his honour a couple of years earlier, and writers like Apollinaire took him seriously when the official art world would not. Within a decade of his death this modest bouquet had crossed the Atlantic to Philadelphia, bought by Albert Barnes, the chemist whose collection now surrounds it with Cézannes and Matisses.