Meadowland

Meadowland (also known as The Pasture) is an oil painting by the French self-taught artist Henri Rousseau, completed in the final year of his life. The scene depicts a cowherd wearing a red hat standing between two cows and a large tree with rounded, densely packed leaves against a pale sky. Rousseau's characteristic flattening of perspective and meticulous, almost naïve rendering of foliage give the pastoral subject a dreamlike stillness quite unlike conventional landscape painting of the period. The work is thought to have been commissioned by an Italian artist who encountered Rousseau's Breton Landscape, Winter at the 1907 Salon des Indépendants and requested a similar rural composition. Like much of Rousseau's late work, Meadowland balances a childlike directness with a quietly unsettling mood, the figures and animals arranged with formal symmetry rather than naturalistic casualness. The painting was brought to Japan by the artist Tsuchida Bakusen, who acquired it in Paris, and it entered the Ishibashi Foundation collection, now housed at the Artizon Museum in Tokyo.