Promeneurs dans un parc

Rousseau came to painting late and from nowhere fashionable. He had spent his working life as a minor Paris customs official, painting on Sundays, and the Salon critics treated him as a joke. This park scene belongs to his last years, before his death in 1910. It has all his marks: the flattened lawns, the stiff little strollers, the trees stacked up like stage flats, everything held with a solemn, careful stillness that trained painters had learned to unlearn. That stiffness was exactly what began to draw the young. Around this time Picasso and his circle threw a half-serious, half-devoted banquet for Rousseau in a Montmartre studio, honouring the self-taught old man the academy had laughed at.