To Celebrate the Baby!

Rousseau painted this in 1903, the year his second wife, Joséphine, died. He was living in Plaisance, a working-class corner of Paris, and took portrait requests from neighbours and acquaintances, and this picture has long been described as one of those commissions. The canvas is a metre tall, and the child fills nearly all of it, standing in a park beneath a tree. One hand gathers up the hem of a white dress, turned into a basket full of flowers. The other holds a puppet on strings, a moustached figure in harlequin colours. Around 1903, small boys and girls in France were both dressed in frocks, so the white dress alone does not tell us which this child was. The painting came to Winterthur in 1970, a gift from the heirs of the collector Olga Reinhart-Schwarzenbach.