Le Pont de Grenelle

In 1892 the Grenelle district sat on the working edge of Paris, where the Seine carried barges and timber past factories and new iron bridges. Rousseau, who spent his days as a minor toll official on the city's outskirts, knew this riverside world firsthand, and he painted it long before the jungle scenes that later made his name. He did not aim for a faithful record. He took studies from the spot and rebuilt the view in the studio into something still and orderly, a wooden cart waiting on the quay, the bridge laid out clean across the water. There is a quiet symmetry here that the real, busy river never had. The canvas now hangs in Laval, the town in western France where Rousseau was born in 1844.