La Falaise

Henri Rousseau spent his working life as a toll collector on the edge of Paris and rarely left the city's suburbs. So a stretch of the Normandy coast, with chalk cliffs and sailing boats out on a grey-green sea, is an odd subject for him. He almost certainly never stood there. Painted around 1895, this bay was worked up from a printed reproduction of someone else's picture, perhaps a Monet of the cliffs at Pourville or a coast scene by Courbet. What comes out is entirely his own: the flat, careful shapes and still water of a man imagining the sea from a page. A single beached boat sits on the sand in the foreground.