Portrait of the second wife of the artist

Henri Rousseau was a Paris customs clerk who taught himself to paint on Sundays and did not paint full time until he was nearly fifty. The critics laughed at his flat, plain pictures, but a younger crowd of artists saw something real in them, and it was they who kept his name alive. This small portrait is of Josephine, the widow he married in 1899 and who died only a few years later. He painted her at pocket size, frank and unshaded, as a companion to a little self-portrait of himself holding a lamp. The pair passed to the painter Robert Delaunay, and then to Pablo Picasso, who admired Rousseau and in 1908 threw a famous party in his honour at his studio. It is through Picasso's own collection that this modest likeness now hangs in a museum bearing his name.