Something
rare found
its way to
Patrick.

Painted for the pure
love of it.

The first thing to understand about this painting is that it was made by someone who was completely free. There is no academy behind it, no rules being followed, no jury to impress and no fashion to match. Every choice here, the bold red field, the flowers that bloom wherever they like, the figures placed exactly where the maker wanted them, was made for one reason only: because it pleased the person painting it.

That is the secret of the whole thing. Trained painters spend years learning what they are not allowed to do. This painter answered to no one, and you can feel that freedom in every inch of it. It is unselfconscious in the best possible way, a grown-up imagination let completely off the leash, and it invites yours along with it.

The proud tradition
of naive art.

This painting is unsigned, and its maker's name is lost to us. But it belongs to one of the most charming, and in the end most respected, traditions in all of art: naive art, the work of self-taught painters who never had, and never wanted, any formal training.

For a long time the art world looked down on such painters. Then came Henri Rousseau, a Paris customs officer who taught himself to paint in his spare time and was laughed at for years, until Picasso and the leading avant-garde of Paris realized he was a genius and threw a famous banquet in his honor. Today his dreamlike jungle scenes hang in the greatest museums in the world. He proved that an untrained eye, following its own vision, could see things the academies never could.

That is the company this painting keeps. The Surrealists loved naive art for exactly the free, dreamlike quality you see here, and collectors prize it because it is honest and unguarded in a way trained work rarely manages. So do not mistake this for a lesser thing because no famous name is attached to it. It is a pure, unfiltered piece of one person's imagination, from a tradition the art world came, in time, to treasure.

Paris,
where the untrained eye was crowned.

I found this painting in Paris. Not the Paris of postcards, but the real, working one, whose flea markets and back rooms are still the greatest hunting ground on earth for exactly this kind of unsigned treasure. Paintings like this pass through the city by the thousand, and every so often one of them stops you in your tracks. This one stopped me.

And there is no more fitting place for a naive painting to turn up. Paris is where this whole tradition was crowned. It was here that a self-taught customs officer was first laughed at and then celebrated as a master, here that the boldest artists in the world decided the untrained eye was worth taking seriously.

It is a city that learned, better than any other, that a painting does not need a diploma behind it to be worth loving. A good place, then, for this one to have spent its life before finding you.

From Paris, it has crossed an ocean to reach you.

The painting's journey: found in Paris, the home of naive art, and now across the world to you.

The flea markets and back rooms of Paris, where unsigned treasures like this one wait, year after year, for the right eye to find them.

The world it
came from.

Caring for your
naive painting.

This is an oil painted on cardboard, a support many mid-century painters loved for working quickly and directly. It is rigid like a panel and likes a stable, dry environment. It arrives unframed, ready for you to frame it however you like. These are the basics of keeping it beautiful for the decades ahead.