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Facts merely impeded Rousseau. He needed fictions. Desperately poor most of his life, he could not travel. He had plenty of sources to draw on, untraceable today because ephemeral then. He used almanacs and magazines, engravings and photographs. He visited the exotic pavilions at the 1889 Exposition in Paris. He could walk in the Jardin des Plantes and hear the big cats roaring and coughing a few hundred yards away in their iron cages, jungle sounds floating to him through a screen of lush foliage. He "knew" what the Nile looked like, and the Niger, and the Amazon: muddier and steamier than the Seine, and lined with a frieze of swollen aspidistras. Out of this, on occasion, he could distill incantation. The Snake Charmer, 1907, condenses a huge popular imagery of the noble savage and the mysterious East. Its wonderful flora--the light ocher blooms like hydrangeas or brains, the green, yellow-fringed leaf spears, the oversize blue foxgloves--look forward to Paul Klee. But the black woman with her glittering eyes, wreathed in obedient snakes, has to be the purest evocation of the colonial sublime in French painting--like a great Gauguin without the sex appeal. It makes one realize what distances separate the routine from the inspired, even among "innocent" visionaries.