Die Angler

1908 was the year France fell in love with flight. Wilbur Wright came over from America and made flights at Le Mans that summer that stunned the crowds and filled the newspapers. Henri Rousseau, a retired Paris toll collector who had taught himself to paint, was reading those papers, and he slipped the news into this calm little scene of anglers on a riverbank. Everything else is his usual quiet suburb: neat houses, a factory chimney, a line of trees, men with rods by still water. Then, up in the sky, a small biplane crosses over them, the newest machine in the world drawn with the same flat, careful patience as the trees. Nobody on the bank looks up at it.