View of the Bridge at Sèvres

Rousseau painted this stretch of the Seine at Sevres, just outside Paris, in 1908, and gave the quiet suburb a very modern sky. Above the bridge and the wooded hills he floats an airship and a small biplane. In 1908 that was nearly news: it was the year Wilbur Wright brought his flying machine to France and made public flights that astonished the crowds, and Paris was caught up in airships and balloons drifting over the rooftops. Rousseau, a retired toll clerk who had taught himself to paint, hung these fragile new machines above an ordinary riverside of houses and trees, all of it worked in his flat, careful greens. A single small figure walks the road below, as though nothing at all were happening overhead.