Prado (El pastizal)

Rousseau painted this small meadow in 1910, the last year of his life. There is not a great deal of event in it, just a bank of grass and trees worked up in his dense, deliberate greens, every leaf given its own firm edge. He had spent his working years as a minor customs official in Paris and came to painting late and self-taught, which is part of why his fields and skies stay so flat and frontal, more built than observed. Landscapes like this one he made close to home, in the gaps between the imaginary jungles that made him famous.