The Muse Inspiring the Poet

Rousseau painted this stiff, tender double portrait in 1909, when the young Paris avant-garde had taken him up as a kind of holy innocent. A year earlier Picasso had thrown him a famous banquet, half mockery and half homage. The two figures are real people, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and his lover, the painter Marie Laurencin, whom Rousseau arranged like solemn monuments. Laurencin had asked him to put sweet william at their feet, a flower that stands for poetry. He made trip after trip to the botanical gardens to study the plant, famously muddled the species anyway, and was pleased enough with the couple to paint them all over again in a second version.