Still Life with Flowers

Henri Rousseau came to painting late and without a day of formal training. For years he worked collecting tolls on the edge of Paris, which earned him the nickname Le Douanier, the customs man, and he took up painting seriously only after retiring in his late 40s. Critics at the official Salons treated him as a joke, and he kept submitting anyway. This vase of flowers dates from around 1905, the same season a room of young painters at the Salon d'Automne was being mocked as fauves, wild beasts, for their raw colour. Rousseau's picture has none of their looseness. He builds each bloom head-on, flat and frontal, with a botanist's patience and a signmaker's clean edges, so the bouquet sits there with an almost startling directness. The greenery is packed tight around the vase, every leaf given its own outline.