The Eiffel Tower

Rousseau kept returning to the Eiffel Tower. In 1890, a year after it opened for the world's fair, he painted himself as a large figure on a Paris quay with the new tower rising behind him. Here, around 1898, it appears again, this time far off at the end of a river view at dusk, under a wide sky of pink and blue cloud. The picture later belonged to the Houston collectors John and Audrey Jones Beck, who bought it in 1968 and gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1998.