Henri Rousseau, Old Junier's Cart

This painting was Henri Rousseau's gift to Monsieur Junier, the grocer whose shop he frequented. Junier extended him credit without complaint and often shared meals with him, and Rousseau, uneasy at always being on the receiving end, decided to paint the Junier family as they set off on a countryside outing in their cart, working from a photograph taken at the time.

The photograph was his starting point, but the finished canvas bears Rousseau's unmistakable hand. He added two figures not in the original photo, Junier's niece and grandniece, and every figure except Junier himself, who turns slightly to one side, stares straight ahead with the fixed frontality of an Egyptian statue. Figures are also sized not by realistic proportion but by apparent importance, recalling the hierarchical scale of medieval painting.

The dogs are rendered with particular invention. The one held by the niece has a strangely goblin-like head, a playful nod to her habit of pinning the dog's ears back with a hairpin. The dog beneath the carriage looms improbably large, while the small dog near the horse shrinks to an exaggerated miniature, and the horse itself seems to tiptoe, almost floating off the ground. Nothing here aims for realism; instead, the painting conjures a dreamlike world apart from reality, which is precisely the charm of Rousseau's style.