Portrait d'Henri Rousseau

Henri Rousseau had died in Paris in 1910, a customs clerk who painted in his off-hours and was mocked by the salons for it. In Munich the next year, Franz Marc and his circle were assembling the Blue Rider, and they saw what the salons had missed. To them, Rousseau's plain, dreamlike scenes were the real thing, and they gathered his work into the almanac they were preparing. This tribute to him is barely larger than a hand. Marc made it as a reverse painting on glass, colour and tinfoil laid behind the pane, in a Bavarian folk technique the group had revived to get clear of academic polish. A self-taught outsider, honoured by painters who had turned to peasant craft for much the reason he moved them. On the back Marc wrote, 'Franz Marc fec.' — Franz Marc made this.