Portrait de Joseph Brummer

Joseph Brummer was a young dealer, not yet 30, and one of the few people taking Henri Rousseau seriously in 1909. Rousseau had spent his working life as a Paris customs clerk and was mocked for years as a naive amateur. Brummer commissioned this portrait, and Rousseau set him in a wicker chair covered in red velvet, hands on the armrests like a throne, a cigarette held with studied ease, feet planted on a sandy path. The dense leaves and the blue hills behind may nod to Brummer's birthplace in what is now Serbia. It was among the last things Rousseau finished. He died in 1910, the year after, still poor, just as the painters and dealers who admired him were starting to win the argument.