QUOTE : 1908 was also the year in which Picasso bought his first picture by Henri Rousseau: this was a very large canvas, the portrait of Yadwigha, a kind Polish schoolmistress. “It obsessed me from the moment I saw it,” he told Florent Fels. “I was walking along the rue des Martyrs. A second-hand dealer had piles of canvases all along the front of his shop. A head stuck out, a woman’s face with a hard look … French penetration, clarity, decision. A huge canvas. I asked the price. ‘Five francs,’ said the dealer, ‘You can paint over it.’ It is one of the most revealing French psychological portraits.