The Merry Jesters

Rousseau spent his working life as a minor Paris customs official and never once left France, yet by 1906 he was painting dense tropical jungles like this one. The bearded monkeys and the tropical bird staring out were built not from travel but from Sunday visits to the Jardin des Plantes, the Paris botanical garden and zoo, and from illustrated children's books and magazines he pored over at home. Look for the overturned bottle spilling in the foreground, an odd small note nobody has fully explained. The younger painters who laughed at his flat, painstaking style also took him seriously. Picasso bought this canvas and kept it in his own collection.