The Painter and His Model

Henri Rousseau spent his working life as a minor customs and toll official in Paris, painting on his days off with no training at all. The Salon critics treated him as a joke, a Sunday amateur who could not draw a convincing hand. Here he paints himself at the work that mattered to him, brush raised, standing before his model and his canvas, as grave as any old master. What he could not have guessed is who was watching. In his last years the young avant-garde adopted him. Picasso threw him a famous banquet, and the poets and painters around them treated his flat, dreamlike pictures as something pure that academic training had bred out of everyone else. This very canvas was bought from his studio around 1908 and passed to the painter Wassily Kandinsky, who in 1911, a year after Rousseau died, showed it in Munich at the first exhibition of the Blaue Reiter, the group that helped open the door to abstract art.