Picasso purchased Rousseau’s painting Portrait of the Woman for 5 francs in 1907

Rousseau and Picasso.


Whilst the general public often ridiculed Rousseau’s work and organizers from the official Salon exhibitions rejected his submissions, he was admired by way of a younger generation of avant-garde artists, many of whom also lived and worked in Montparnasse at various points in their careers. This group of artists included Picasso, who bought several of Rousseau’s paintings realistic and held a legendary banquet, ‘Le Banquet Rousseau’, in his honor. A number of these younger artists were fascinated with so-called ‘primitive’ art, discovering an effective type of expression in African tribal masks and other non-Western artifacts. On their behalf, Rousseau would be a homegrown curiosity, a ‘modern primitive’ whose painting techniques captured something from the vitality they admired during these other artistic representations.
Picasso purchased Rousseau’s painting Portrait of a Woman (c.1895) for five francs in 1907. He kept it by him, moving it from residence to residence for the next 65 years, until his death in 1973.

This pair of portraits (below), representing Rousseau and his wife, were acquired through the painter Robert Delaunay and later purchased by Picasso, who proudly displays them in this photograph (shown right) used 1965. The simplicity of the themes as well as the lamps evoke the domesticity of family life. Such paintings were much admired from the Parisian avant-garde, who applauded Rousseau’s power to find poetry in the everyday.