The Snake Charmer

Henri Rousseau never saw a jungle. He worked for years as a Paris toll collector, and the closest he came to these dark forests was the city's botanical gardens and hothouses, where he sketched tropical plants under glass. He painted this in 1907, and it was his first large commission, ordered by Berthe de Delaunay, the mother of the painter Robert Delaunay. She had travelled in India and asked him for something remembered from those travels. What Rousseau gave her instead is his own invention: a dark, still woman playing a flute by moonlight at the edge of the water, one snake coiled around her shoulders and others sliding through the reeds toward the sound. The trained painters of the day dismissed him as an untutored amateur. This canvas was shown at the Salon d'Automne that autumn, and it later passed to the couturier and collector Jacques Doucet.