The Rabbit's Meal

Henri Rousseau painted this in 1908, the same year Picasso threw him a mock-solemn banquet in a Montmartre studio, hanging the old man's canvas in the place of honour and toasting him half in tribute, half in fun. Rousseau was in his 60s, a retired Paris toll clerk who had taught himself to paint on his days off. The Salon juries treated him as a clumsy amateur, while the young avant-garde around Picasso and the poet Apollinaire had decided he was a kind of genius. The picture keeps to his gentle, deadpan world: a rabbit being offered a scrap of food in a garden, every leaf given the same patient, even attention. This one belonged to a local grocer named Junier, whom Rousseau also painted, and it is said to have been found still hanging in the shop a few years later.