The Flamingoes

Henri Rousseau never saw a jungle. He spent his working life as a minor toll official on the edge of Paris, and everything exotic in his pictures came from the city's botanical garden, the zoo, and illustrated magazines. He painted this around 1907, in his early 60s, while the professional critics still treated him as a joke, a Sunday painter who could not draw. The younger avant-garde saw it differently, and within a year Picasso and his circle were toasting him at a famous banquet in Montmartre. He built the scene the way he built all of them, one plant at a time. Every leaf and lily lies flat and separate on the surface, and the flamingoes stand along the far water like a paper frieze.