Sägewerk am Rande von Paris

Henri Rousseau painted this in the early 1890s, in hours snatched from a dull government job. By day he was a toll collector on the edge of Paris, checking the carts and goods that came into the city, and he had taught himself to paint with no schooling at all. He knew this kind of place first-hand. It is the ragged outskirts, where the last fields and garden plots run up against low sheds and a working sawmill, and the roads and rows of small flowers rush into the distance faster than any trained painter would have allowed. That headlong perspective is what gives an ordinary industrial corner its strange, dreamlike stillness.