La Muse inspirant le poète

This double portrait from 1909 shows the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, pen and scroll in hand, beside his companion the painter Marie Laurencin, cast as his muse with her arm raised. Both were young figures at the centre of avant-garde Paris. Their champion was Rousseau, a self-taught painter who had spent years as a Paris toll collector and was mocked by many for his flat, dreamlike style. Apollinaire was one of the few who defended him in print. Rousseau painted the scene twice, and in this version he changed the flowers around their feet after Apollinaire commented on the first. He finished it the year before he died in 1910, and Apollinaire kept the picture until his own death in 1918.