The Avenue in Saint-Cloud Park

The Avenue in Saint-Cloud Park was painted around 1908, during the last active years of Henri Rousseau's life, when he continued to find subjects in the parks, gardens, and outskirts of Paris that had furnished motifs throughout his career. The Park of Saint-Cloud, on the western edge of the city, was laid out in the seventeenth century under the royal landscape architect André Le Nôtre for the domain of Louis XIV; it became a public park after the château was destroyed during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. The painting entered the Städel through the collection of Pauline Kowarzik, a Frankfurt collector closely associated with the museum who became in 1916 the first woman appointed to its acquisition committee; Kowarzik sold her collection to the Städel in 1926 for a monthly life annuity when inflation had depleted her finances. Rousseau was born in Laval, Mayenne, on 21 May 1844 and settled in Paris in 1868, working as a toll collector in the Paris customs service — the occupation that gave him the nickname Le Douanier. He taught himself to paint in his early forties and retired from the customs service around 1885 to devote himself to painting full-time. From 1886 he exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants, gaining the admiration of Picasso, Apollinaire, and other avant-garde figures in the early twentieth century. He died in Paris on 2 September 1910.