If report has the truth correctly, Rousseau began his career as painter at the age of forty, though it is quite possible and probable that he was painting whenever he could, in his untutored fashion, in all of his spare intervals, and with but one object in view apparent: to give forth in terms of painting those phases of his own personal life which remained indelibly impressed upon his memory, pictorially always vivid to him, as in his pictures they are seen to be the scenes or incidents of loveliness to his fine imagination. We find them covering a rather wide range of experience, apparently in two places, somewhere in the tropics of Mexico, and Paris; the former, experiences of youth in some sort of governmental service I believe, and the latter, the more intimate phases of life about him in Paris, of Paris herself and of those people who created for him the intimacy of his home life, and the life which centered about the charming rue de Perelle where he lived. In Rousseau then, we have one of the finest individual expressions of the amateur spirit in painting, taking actually a place among the examples of paintings, such as those of the Kwakiutl Indians, or the sculpture of the Congo people, partaking of the very same quality of directness and simplicity, and of contact with the prevailing image chosen for representation. He was too evidently the product of himself, he was not hybrid, nor was he in any sense something strange springing up out of the soil in the dark of night, he was not mushroom. He did not know the meaning of affectation, and I doubt if he even knew what was meant by simplicity, so much was he that element himself. It is with fascination that we think of him as living his life out after his discharge for incompetency from the customs service outside the fortifications of Paris, and doubtless with the strain of poverty upon him also, within a ten minutes' walk from the world famous quartiers, and almost certainly knowing nothing of them. That there was a Julian's or a Colarossi's anywhere about, it is not likely that he knew, or if he knew, not more than vaguely. He drew his quaint inspirations directly from the sources of nature and some pencil drawings I have seen prove the high respect and admiration, amounting to love and worship, which he had for nature and the phenomena of her, to be disclosed at every hedge.