Quai d'Ivry

Henri Rousseau spent his working life as a Paris toll collector who painted on his days off, which earned him the affectionate nickname le Douanier, the customs man. Here he leaves behind his famous jungles for the Quai d'Ivry, an industrial reach of the Seine on the city's southeastern edge, all smokestacks and low riverside sheds. In the upper left he sets a small airship in the sky, its tail fins matching those fitted to La Patrie, France's first army dirigible, in 1907, the same year he painted this. That November La Patrie broke free of its moorings in a gale and vanished over the sea, never recovered. In the picture it still floats there, intact, above the smoking riverbank.