The story
Around 1892 Henri Rousseau, the self-taught painter nicknamed the Douanier after his job in the Paris toll service, painted the Pont de Grenelle over the Seine, with the small replica of the Statue of Liberty that had been set up beside it in 1889. Later the painter Robert Delaunay, one of his keenest young admirers, bought about ten of Rousseau's works, this one among them. Today it hangs in Laval, the town in western France where Rousseau was born in 1844.
The museum that holds it was created in his memory in 1967, in Laval's Vieux-Château, the old castle above the river Mayenne with its 13th-century round keep. At the time it was the first museum in France devoted to naive art. Three paintings by Rousseau are on show, alongside self-taught painters from France and abroad and the so-called singular artists who belong to no school. In 2024 the bridge picture travelled to Montpellier for an exhibition, and the Centre Pompidou lent Laval a 1906 portrait by Delaunay in return.
