O Alegre Quarteto

Henri Rousseau painted this in 1902, when he was about 58 and newly retired from his job collecting tolls at the gates of Paris. That work gave him his nickname, le Douanier, the customs man, and he had taught himself to paint in his spare hours with no schooling at all. Critics at the yearly open exhibition treated him as a joke, a Sunday amateur who could not draw. Here is his kind of subject anyway, a naked man piping to a naked woman, a child and a dog beside them in a green grove, an Eden with no one in charge. Within a few years the young painters of Montmartre began collecting him. In 1908 Picasso threw a banquet in his own studio in Rousseau's honour.