The Chair Factory in Alfortville

By the 1890s the edge of Paris was filling with the kind of place this shows: a suburb like Alfortville, downriver where the Marne meets the Seine, with small factories and their chimneys crowding the water. Henri Rousseau, who spent his working life as a minor customs official collecting tolls at the city gates, painted these outskirts plainly and carefully. A signboard on the building announces that it makes chairs. A single figure fishes from the towpath while the smoke goes up behind him. Rousseau had no formal training and was mocked for it in his lifetime, yet he looked hard at the ordinary industrial suburb most painters ignored. The clouds are stacked in neat rows, each one drawn almost like a solid object.