The Liberty of Art
 

 Pablo Picasso, who got to know the Douanier's painting by 1908 at the latest, but most probably around 1905, is reported as saying: "There is nothing odd about Rousseau. He is the most perfect representation of a distinctive and immutable logic". This opinion is in marked contrast to the still prevailing view of Rousseau's naivete as a consequence of lack of professional skill.

 

 These two motifs function as heroic attributes for the central figure, which in the original design was even larger. The series of national flags - most of them freely invented, except for the tricolor and the Union Jack - create in the background a kind of garland for the painter, with the promise of international esteem. Clothed in dignified black, he hovers in collage style in the world of his imagination which matches precisely the townscape of Paris. So concrete is his notion of the icon-like self-portrait, reminiscent of the notions of late mediaeval artists, that he updates it autobiographically over the years. On the artist's palette one may see written the name of his wife Clemence, who died in 1888.

 Alongside it there appears the name of his second wife Josephine, whom he married in 1899. In 1905 he decorates his lapel with the "Palmes academiques", an honour received in error. "When this work was exhibited in the Salon des Independants, Paul Gauguin, tired of pointillism, allegedly exclaimed: "There is truth . . . there is the future . . . there is the very essence of painting!" In this picture Rousseau indeed achieves a remarkable synthesis of form and colour which defines in its own terms the modern style as planar juxtaposition in all its purity. Moreover, he makes radical use of black, which had been banned since Impressionist times, and in so doing he clearly rejects optical illusion. Most surprisingly of all, in making a familiar object into an autonomous element within the picture he is a forerunner of Pop Art. He entrusts to the brush of his alter ego the red with which his own hand has painted the flags on the canvas.

 The proud inventor of the Portrait-Landscape maintained a dogged and uncompromising stance towards the public, and it is not only in his dreams and desires that an explanation is to be found. Behind the self-portrait, and behind many of his other works, lies an avowal of faith in the French Revolution, which includes an clement of sentimental nationalism.
 

 
These two pictures, which provoked inordinate laughter, are testimony to Rousseau's republican views. He is also said to have been a freemason, a pacifist and - like many an urban petit bourgeois - an adherent of revolutionary movements. Pride in the political role of the people and a desire for democratic equality for the benefit of all determined his thinking and provide clues to many puzzles. Both these pictures, and the self-portrait, reflect something of the ambience of the Paris World Exhibition of 1889, an unprecedented apotheosis of peace and progress undertaken under the auspices of the French nation. Rousseau's lifelong love of new technology and of the brilliant colouring of flags, uniforms and costumes, in which red and black were prominent, will have led him to share the euphoria of the French politician and philosopher Jules Simon: "Here there are no more disputes between political philosophies and nations, we are all citizens of the Eiffel Tower!" Moreover, both pictures were conceived with a view to obtaining public commissions. In 1893 Rousseau submitted a landscape and a second version of A Centenary of Independence to the competition for the town hall in Bagnolet.

 Yet political allegory is not all that the Douanier is striving for in these compositions. He is declaring himself a republican in art. In his autobiographical notes he demands "full creative freedom for the artist whose inspiration is for the beautiful and the good", and these pictures are ample evidence of his refusal to conform. In the self-portrait he entirely ignores the familiar in order to develop further his montage technique. He draws on sources from popular culture of the time. The ring of dancers in A Centenary of Independence is copied, presumably by means of a pantograph, from an illustration in the "Petit Journal". The likenesses in The Representatives of Foreign Powers are taken from an almanac and combined with uniforms to create stiff figures reminiscent of fairground or photomontage dummies. The template-style application of local colour isolates one item from another, rather in the manner of pre-Renaissance painting, and creates an array of figures without perspective, two-dimensional, almost abstract. The narrative motifs become structural components. The added details give these scenes a rhythmic sense of joyful ornamentation, matching on a large scale the patterns on the little flags. The pictures take on the quality of a frozen rainbow. They anticipate the placard-style trivia of collage artists such as Max Ernst.

 With his colour puzzle of 1892 Rousseau entered into competition with the intellectual avant-garde, which is indicative not only of his ambition but also of the self-assurance that he, the lay painter, had by that time acquired. He drew sustenance from praise ostensibly accorded him by Puvis de Chavannes (though possibly the visitor was Paul Gauguin in disguise): "Mr. Rousseau, as a rule I do not think highly of the gaudy colours favoured here by the Indépendants, but yours I like very much because they are right." Rousseau concluded: "He was thinking of my 'Centenary of Independence'. In the paper lanterns alone there were sixty-two different tones."