The Ship in the Tempest

Rousseau taught himself to paint while working as a Paris toll collector, which is why people called him le Douanier, the customs man. He made this stormy sea around 1899, though he had almost certainly never watched a real gale from a deck. The waves look cut from sheet metal, the sky like a painted stage backdrop, the little steamer pitched at an angle no trained marine painter would have allowed. His source was likely secondhand, a vast panorama of an Atlantic crossing shown at the 1889 world's fair in Paris, or a warship he had read about in the papers. Academic painters mocked this flat, blunt manner for years. Rousseau kept at it, and the young Picasso would soon be collecting his canvases.