Walk in the Wood

When Henri Rousseau painted this quiet wood around 1886, he had no formal training and a day job collecting tolls at the gates of Paris. That same year the Salon des Indépendants opened without a jury and gave a self-taught customs clerk his first public wall, where critics found his flat, patient pictures easy to laugh at. There are no lions here and no tropical leaves. The jungle scenes that later made his name were still years away. This is an ordinary forest on the edge of the city, with slender trunks and thin bare branches spread almost like a screen, and a single well-dressed woman walking among them under an umbrella.