Portrait of a Woman

As a young man scraping by in Paris, Pablo Picasso paid five francs at a junk dealer's stall for a big canvas he meant, so the story goes, to paint over. It turned out to be this full-length portrait by Henri Rousseau, a self-taught painter most of the art world still treated as a joke. Picasso kept it, held on to it for the rest of his life, and in 1908 threw a famous banquet in Rousseau's honor at his ramshackle Montmartre studio. You can see what caught his eye. A woman in a black dress stands stiff and frontal against a thin sky, a small bird crossing behind her, a branch in her hand, every fold set down with the same patient flatness. It hangs now in the Musée Picasso, among the things he chose never to part with.