Statue de Diane dans le parc

Rousseau painted the Tuileries gardens in central Paris, with a stone Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, standing among the trees and a hound at her feet. The statue is a real one, carved in the 1860s and set up in the Tuileries in 1872, so anyone in the city could have walked past it. Rousseau almost certainly did not paint it there. Like most of his pictures, this was worked up indoors from a postcard or a photograph, which is why the trees sit so flat and still and the light never quite falls the way it would outdoors. He was self-taught and kept his modest job as a Paris customs official for years. Scholars still disagree on when he made this, some placing it in the late 1880s, others among his final works around the end of the 1900s. The dog looks up. Nothing else in the garden moves.