Свадьба

Rousseau was a Paris toll collector who taught himself to paint in his spare time, and around 1905 the young avant-garde had begun to prize exactly the stiffness the academies laughed at. This looks at first like a wedding photograph: the family lined up in their Sunday black, staring straight ahead, posed among the trees. Look a moment longer and the logic slips. The bride in white seems to float rather than stand, her veil laid oddly over the grandmother beside her. A large black dog sits square in the foreground, too big for the space, anchoring the whole picture. X-rays have shown Rousseau kept reworking it; the grandmother's dress once reached all the way down to that dog. He painted the bride's veil in last, over figures already finished.