Boy on the Rocks

Rousseau made this in the mid-1890s, in Paris, while earning his living as a minor toll collector on the edge of the city. He had no formal training and painted in his spare time, and his work puzzled the critics of the day, who couldn't decide whether to laugh at it. Look at the scale here and you see why. A boy in a black jacket sits perched on a few pointed rocks, but those rocks seem to rise over a range of tiny hills far below, so the child reads almost like a giant seated on a mountaintop. His face is round and doll-like, the eyes too big, the pose stiff. Rousseau doesn't correct any of it. He gives the rocks the same hard, careful finish as the boy, as if the strange scale were simply how the world looked to him.