Io stesso: ritratto-paesaggio

Henri Rousseau was a Paris toll collector who taught himself to paint on Sundays, which is why people called him le Douanier, the customs man. He painted this large self-portrait in 1890, when he was 46 and still years away from being taken seriously by anyone but a few young avant-garde artists. He plants himself in the foreground, palette in hand, dark suit and beret, dwarfing the whole city behind him. Look at what he chose to put back there. A steamship flying flags on the Seine, and above it the Eiffel Tower, finished just the year before for the 1889 World's Fair and still the newest thing in Paris. A hot-air balloon drifts in the sky. On his palette he lettered the names of his two wives. He kept reworking the canvas for years, even adding a beard to match his own as it grew.