Joven en rosa

Henri Rousseau came to painting late and taught himself, spending his working years as a toll collector on the edge of Paris, which earned him the nickname Le Douanier, the customs man. Scholars still argue over when he made this small portrait of a child in pink. The museum places it near the end of his life, around 1907, though some put it more than a decade earlier. Either way it shows his settled way with a face. The figure is set square to us and firmly outlined, the features simplified and still, the pink dress laid on in flat, even color. The official Salon would not have him, so he showed instead at the open exhibitions any amateur could enter. The child looks straight out, unsmiling, hands quiet.