A Centennial of Independence

Peasants dance the farandole, the old ring dance of the south of France, around three liberty trees in a village square, while two female figures crowned as the First and Third Republics stand beside them, banners wave and a wagon of costumed musicians waits in the background. The picture celebrates the centenary of the proclamation of the first French Republic in 1792, and Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) painted it in 1892, when the civic festivals and May Day parades of the young Third Republic were still new. Rousseau was a self-taught painter who spent most of his working life at the Paris toll barrier, and he never had a teacher to tell him what a picture should look like. He took the group of dancers from a magazine illustration and built the scene around them, adding the liberty poles, the banners and the allegorical figures himself, and he used brilliant, unmodulated colour and flat, solid forms to convey the happiness of the occasion and the good government it stands for. That untutored clarity made him a hero to later generations of modern painters, from the Cubists, who admired the way he built a picture from simple shapes, to the Surrealists, who prized his dreamlike stillness. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.