Paisaje exótico

Rousseau never saw a jungle. He spent his working years as a toll collector on the edge of Paris, and he grew these dripping green worlds out of the city itself, the hot palm houses and the caged animals at the Jardin des Plantes, the botanical garden, along with illustrated books and stuffed creatures in shop windows. Look at the monkey on the branch, reaching for a ripe orange just past its grip. In 1908, the year he made this, the official salons still treated him as a joke, an untrained amateur with a day job. That same autumn the young Picasso and his friends threw a banquet in his honor up in Montmartre, half teasing and half serious, because they saw something the academy had missed. The foliage is built up leaf by leaf, each frond outlined on its own, the patient work of a man who studied real plants in a glasshouse and invented the rest.