Village Street

By 1909 Henri Rousseau was in his sixties, with about a year left to live. He is remembered for dense imaginary jungles, lions and tigers among giant leaves, painted by a man who never left France. This small canvas shows the other side of his work: an ordinary village street, the everyday kind of subject he actually saw, rendered with the same patient flatness he gave those tigers. Every window sits square, the figures stand still, and the trees are clipped into neat rounded shapes. A former Paris toll collector who taught himself to paint on Sundays, Rousseau was by now being taken up by the young avant-garde, Picasso among them, even as the official Salon still kept its distance. The picture measures only about 33 by 43 centimeters.