Woman with Basket of Eggs

Henri Rousseau died in a Paris hospital in 1910, known to most of the art world as a retired customs officer whose pictures the Salon crowds came to laugh at. Within 15 years his prices were being set in dollars. Between 1923 and 1929 the Philadelphia chemist Albert Barnes, whose fortune came from an antiseptic he had patented, bought 18 of his canvases, still the largest group of Rousseaus in any one collection. What he said he valued was the honesty of the approach.

This is one of the small ones, about 35 centimetres tall, a woman carrying a basket of eggs. Barnes hung his pictures in dense symmetrical arrangements of his own devising and left instructions that they were never to be rearranged, so when the collection moved into central Philadelphia in 2012 the walls were rebuilt exactly as he had left them.