The Banks of the Oise

The Oise flows into the Seine just north-west of Paris, and by 1907 its banks were well-worn painters' country. Charles-François Daubigny had worked there from a studio boat, and Camille Pissarro spent years at Pontoise, on the same river. Henri Rousseau's stretch of it is strictly ordered. The poplars on the left stand in a row like fence posts, the big tree on the right is built up leaf by leaf, and three cattle graze in a line across the meadow. Between two of them, almost hidden, stands a tiny herdsman in blue. Harvard's curators read his cap as a Phrygian cap, an ancient headgear that Rousseau liked to slip into his landscapes for a touch of fantasy. On the back of the stretcher someone wrote Bords de l'Oise, 1907. The canvas came to Harvard's Fogg Museum in 1951 with the collection of the New York banker Maurice Wertheim, who asked that his pictures always be shown together.