Rendezvous in the Forest

1889 was the year Paris showed off the future. The Exposition Universelle opened with the brand-new Eiffel Tower rising over it, the tallest thing anyone had yet built, all iron and electric light. In the middle of that, Rousseau painted this: a man and a woman on a single horse, in old-fashioned dress, halted deep in a dark wood with the trees closing over them. Nothing modern is anywhere in it. He gave the finished picture to his baker, apparently to settle what he owed on bread. The two do not embrace or speak. They simply pause, lit faintly against the massed leaves. Rousseau layers the foliage so densely that you cannot tell how deep the wood goes, and the riders seem stopped in it for good.