The child with the doll

Henri Rousseau taught himself to paint in his spare time while working as a minor Paris toll official, which earned him the nickname the customs officer. Trained artists laughed at his stiff, flat figures and his indifference to proper perspective. This round-faced child stands square to us, filling almost the whole canvas, gripping a doll in one hand and a flower in the other, the grass rendered blade by patient blade. Rousseau made it around the turn of the century, just as a younger generation around Picasso was beginning to prize exactly the directness the academies scorned. He set the child against foliage so dense and deliberate that an ordinary portrait turns oddly solemn.