Paysage exotique

Rousseau painted this in 1910, the last year of his life, and like all his jungles it shows a place he never saw. He liked to hint that the tropics came from his army days in Mexico, but he had almost certainly never left France. The real sources were close to home: the glasshouses of the Paris botanical garden, the animals in the city zoo, and cheap illustrated books. Here orange trees hang heavy with fruit while pale monkeys move through the leaves under a flat blue sky, everything drawn with the same patient, deliberate clarity. By this point the young painters and poets of Paris, Picasso among them, had taken up the retired toll clerk as one of their own.