 I'm Nancy Eisen and thank you for joining me this morning. I'm the Gunn Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation but as you can see today I'm actually in my apartment. I wish however we were in Gallery 11 of the Foundation looking at the wall and that's the image that you have in front of us right now and really the thing that I want to focus your attention on isn't that wonderful Matty's still life in the middle of the room which is probably what hits you first when you do walk into the space. It's a little picture just off to our right hand side and it's by the French artist Henri Rousseau. Rousseau was born in 1844 in the provincial French town of Laval and the working question is called the family and let's just focus in right now. So here we have a scene of a family. We have some smartly dressed figures men and women different genders on different side of the picture and we have a rather large baby right at the front there and really let's just focus in on that child. I mean my goodness it's not the most attractive of children what it's fair to say and it's huge in relation to the rest of the figures really that baby is dominating the space. They seem to be in a country setting. I love those shuttered windows and look at the grass. Rousseau has a wonderful way of painting grass and I'm just going to focus you in here. Look these wonderful little delineated brush strokes just done with a fine brush there so really kind of meticulously painted but what I want to talk about today is who are these people? Now sadly we don't have a fixed answer to that. We don't know who the family in question are but it's probably fair to say that they were people Rousseau knew well. At this point in his career he isn't a professional painter he moved to Paris as a young man to make a living and he discovered painting fairly late on in life he starts to exhibit work when he's already in his 40s and so at this time he's probably taking commissions from friends of the family, people in his neighborhood, people who were potentially small shopkeepers, small business people, perhaps people who worked for local government, modest middle-class folks and really what we see here is a group of people who are probably dressed up for the occasion. The likelihood is I think with that baby right in the centre of the scene they're celebrating perhaps a baptism, perhaps a birth and if you look at the figures to our left hand side they're actually holding glasses and those glasses seem to be filled with some sort of spirit or wine. Now when I first saw this picture I thought oh man they must be drinking champagne but the grey-haired gentleman is sat on a barrel so the likelihood is it's probably wine and actually if you go right into the image you see that there's a little pink tint to those glasses it's almost as if they're the same colour as the flesh of the hand so really perhaps they're drinking rose they seem happier for sure than the figures without glasses so one assumes it's something pretty nice. Now one thing that Rousseau was very proud of in the 1890s was having invented something that he called the portrait landscape and these were portraits that told you something about the people that were represented in them so it wasn't enough just to have a figure in a scene you needed to have things in the picture that told you about who those people were and I wonder given the fact that the grey-haired gentleman is sat on the barrel given the fact that the whole family are there maybe these are people who make a living from that trade. Now that might also lead us to another way of looking at the scene and Rousseau as I mentioned was from Laval which is nowadays in Brittany and France so in the north of France and in the 1870s and 1880s that had been a part of the world which was famous for its wines or at least produced good wines. Now unfortunately due to a blight that had hit the vines that business had really suffered in the 1880s and we can all understand how these natural disasters can really affect people's livelihoods. By the 1890s that business was on the upturn again scientific methods had come in they'd been able to use American vines to revive the French vines and so I wonder whether in this picture we don't just have the celebration of a baby we have the celebration of another kind of renewal another sign of life going on and perhaps I wonder the figures in this scene and not just raising a toast to family they're raising a toast to the things that keep family going. Now please when you do come back to the galleries make a real point of seeing this work. Rousseau paints this family with such a tenderness he'd had a lot of family troubles himself over the seven children he and his wife had had only one of them actually survived to adulthood so really this is something very precious we see an artist really making the most of the things around him and really I think that's something we can all do at this precise moment. We look forward to seeing you back at the barns and in the meantime do take care of yourselves and do please tune into our next barns takeout. Thank you very much.