The recently discovered painting by Henri Rousseau, customs officer by profession and self-taught artist, is an excep­tional source of information about the early period of his artistic creation. The painting has survived intact, untouched by conservators, bearing no traces of excessive washes, still fixed on its original stretcher, and showing only obvious marks of its age. It was kept somewhere in the French provinces by the family of painter Marie Adolphe Edouard de Otemar who received it as a gift from the artist himself. The painting was created in 1880 and is one of the oldest works by this artist. It defined the artist's future for whom exhibition halls, art galleries and private collections were to open their doors wide. This very first canvas presaged the birth of a great painter.