Notre Dame

Henri Rousseau spent his working life as a minor Paris toll official, painting on Sundays and holidays, laughed at by many for pictures that looked like the work of a gifted child. This is one of his last, made in 1909, a year before he died. It looks across the Seine to the Île Saint-Louis, with the towers of Notre-Dame and the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle rising in the soft, still light he loved in the older painter Corot. A single black-clad man stands on the quay with a walking stick, and people have long wondered whether it is Rousseau himself, out along the river he had walked and worked beside for years.