Still Life with Fruit

The Dutch record for this canvas names what the label leaves out, a silver dish, a chest, and pots of preserved fruit. It is nearly a metre high and wider still, a large canvas for a table of jars, and Rousseau was in his mid-20s when he painted it. Its later history is why it is state property today. By 1943 it had gone into the collection Hitler was assembling for a museum at Linz, the Austrian city where he had gone to school. American officers registered it at the Munich Central Collecting Point in October 1945, it left there for the Netherlands in May 1946, and the Dutch state has held it ever since, among the works recovered from Germany whose earlier owners are still being traced. It hangs in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.