Ritratto del Signor X (Pierre Loti)

Rousseau painted for years while working as a Paris toll collector, and the trained artists of his day mostly treated him as a joke. This portrait proves it almost literally. Soon after it was made, the humorist Georges Courteline bought it and hung it in what he called his museum of horrors, a private collection of paintings he found gloriously bad. The sitter is usually said to be the writer Pierre Loti, a naval officer famous for exotic travel books, though Rousseau left him unnamed, which is why the title still calls him Monsieur X. He sits stiff and flat in a red fez, a cigarette between his fingers, a small cat at his feet.