At the now-legendary banquet at the Bateau Lavoir studio organized by Pablo Picasso and his friends in 1908 to celebrate Henri Rousseau, the honoree famously told his host that they were “the two greatest painters of their day, you in the Egyptian manner, I in the modern manner.” This wonderful, often-quoted observation is usually interpreted as an indication of Rousseau’s naïveté. Picasso was, after all, already Picasso in 1908 and his colleague, inaccurately known as the Douanier, the customs officer—he was, in fact, a toll collector—is even today still seen as an outsider, an innocent, self-taught artist. Picasso, at the time, together with his friend Georges Braque, was beginning to change forever our conceptions of pictorial space, recklessly defying all conventional ideas about representation. Rousseau, for all the off-beat charm of his work, clung to time-honored ideas about illusionism, meticulously modeling and shading rigid, confrontational figures against leafy backgrounds—he described himself as the inventor of the “portrait landscape”—painting eerie city scenes and dream jungles of giant houseplants inhabited by improbable beasts. What Picasso replied to his guest is not recorded, but there’s no doubt that the young Spaniard was a fan of the older man’s work. He treasured Rousseau’s large, full-length portrait of a standing woman, found in a Paris junk shop—“you can paint on the back,” the proprietor apparently told him—as well as two small heads, portraits of the artist and his second wife, all of which are now in the collection of the Musée Picasso. Nor was