La Basse-cour

Henri Rousseau came to painting late. He spent more than 20 years as a toll collector on the edge of Paris, checking goods that came into the city, and only gave it up in 1893, in his late forties, to paint full time. This small barnyard dates from a few years after that, around 1896. It is the kind of plain subject he made alongside the tropical scenes he is now known for, though he never left France and built those jungles from the hothouses and the menagerie of the Paris botanical gardens. Here nothing had to be invented: a few hens, a low wall, a patch of bare ground.