The Waterfall

Rousseau painted this jungle in 1910, the last year of his life, and may not have finished it. A few leaves on the left never got the extra layers he usually gave them. The odd thing about his jungles is that he never saw one. He had spent years as a minor Paris customs official, which earned him the nickname the Douanier, the customs man, and he built these dense green worlds from visits to the city's botanical garden and zoo, from illustrated magazines, and from his own imagination. Here two deer stand alert in the undergrowth, a small figure half-hidden among the leaves, water falling in a thin white line behind. Younger artists like Picasso had begun to prize exactly this untrained, dreamlike directness. Rousseau died that September, aged 66.