Passerelle de Passy

When Rousseau painted this footbridge over the Seine at Passy around 1890, he was still a working man, a clerk in the Paris toll service who painted only in his spare hours. Paris was fresh from the world's fair of 1889 and its brand-new Eiffel Tower, and the city was filling with iron and new structures like this pedestrian span on its western edge. Rousseau gives the scene his usual calm, flattened treatment: neat little figures crossing, trees like cut-outs, a still river and a soft sky, everything oddly quiet for a fast-growing capital. He would not leave the toll job to paint full time until a few years after this.