Landscape With Milkmaids

Rousseau came to painting late and sideways. For years he worked as a Paris toll collector and painted only on his days off, which earned him the nickname Le Douanier, the customs man. By 1906, when he made this quiet view of Brittany, the professional critics still treated him as a joke, but a younger generation of artists had begun to look harder. He never trained, and it shows here in the best way: the cows and the milkmaids sit in a landscape flattened almost like a stage set, each tree and figure placed with a care that ignores the ordinary rules of depth. Two years later the young Picasso would throw him a now famous banquet in Montmartre. The stillness is complete; nothing in the scene seems to move.