Charenton-le-Pont

By 1907 Henri Rousseau had spent much of his working life at the toll gates on the edge of Paris, checking the goods that came into the city. He painted its outskirts the way other people remember a daily walk. Charenton-le-Pont sits just southeast of the capital, where the river Marne runs into the Seine, and in those years it was filling up with workshops and traffic on the city's growing rim. Rousseau gives this plain suburb the same patient, flat clarity he brought to his famous jungles. In that same year he was also painting The Snake Charmer, a dream of tigers and moonlit reeds. Here the subject is only a river town he could reach on foot, set down roof by roof with equal care. He was 63, self-taught, and still showing every spring at the Salon des Indépendants, where part of the crowd came to laugh at him.