Stand close to the painting below and do the slow thing: count the greens. Dozens of them, laid on flat, one beside another, each blade of leaf outlined and finished before the next one begins. Nothing is blurred by distance, because he did not paint distance; he painted every leaf as though it were the only one, and then painted the next. The moon at the upper right is pale and small, about the size of a coin. Somewhere in the foliage there are lions, a snake, an elephant's head, oranges on a branch, a flute-player in stripes, and a woman on a red velvet sofa pointing into the dark. It is a hothouse remembered in an apartment, at night.
Henri Rousseau died in Paris on this day in 1910, aged sixty-six. For most of his working life he collected tolls and taxes at the city's edge, which earned him the affectionate name Le Douanier. He began painting seriously in his forties and left the job at forty-nine to give the rest of his hours to it. Before that, the painting happened in the evenings, after the shift.
He never saw a jungle. He had the botanical hothouses and the menagerie of Paris, and the patience to look at a single frond until he knew it. The critics of his day mostly filed him under charming or crude, and he kept going. In the portrait below, the black coat, the white collar, the small gold pin: a man dressed for an office, who went home and made a forest.
Fabien, the detail I keep: barely a handful of mourners at the grave in 1910, the kind of house a projectionist knows well, seven coats and a lot of empty seats. Picasso had already thrown him that banquet two years earlier, and within a few years the painters were quoting him openly. The audience arrived after the curtain, as it sometimes does.
Fabien, the lines Apollinaire wrote for him were later cut into the gravestone by another hand, so the poet's words arrived on the stone through a sculptor's chisel. A fitting last page for a man who was patient with surfaces.