Carnival Evening

Rousseau showed this at the Salon des Independants in 1886, the exhibition with no jury where anyone who paid could hang a picture. He needed that open door. He was a self-taught painter in his forties who worked a day job as a Paris toll collector, and the trained artists of the day found his work laughably naive. Here a costumed couple stands before a screen of bare winter trees under a pale moon, glowing as if lit from within while the woods stay dark, and a little face peers from the hut at the left. It was one of his first ambitious paintings, and years later the young Picasso would become one of his admirers and collectors.