La fábrica de sillas

Alfortville was one of the plain new industrial suburbs going up just south-east of Paris in the 1890s, the kind of place nobody thought to paint. Rousseau did. He picked out an ordinary chair factory there and made it the whole subject, blowing the building up far larger than it should be against a little road, a canal, and a single man fishing. Across the front he lettered the real firm's name, Chesnoy et Cie, Fabrique de chaises, exactly as the sign would have read. He worked as a toll clerk on the edge of the city and clearly looked hard at these unglamorous outskirts as he passed through them. A tall sky of round clouds sits over the flat red-and-white façade, and the factory lies mirrored, quite still, in the canal below.