La Senna e la Torre Eiffel al tramonto

When the Eiffel Tower went up for the 1889 world's fair, a good part of Paris hated it. Artists and writers signed a protest calling the iron thing a monstrous shadow over the city, and it was only meant to stand for twenty years. Henri Rousseau, who painted this small riverside view, saw it differently. He was a self-taught painter who spent his working life as a minor customs official, and he treated the new tower the way he treated everything, plainly and head-on, as one more upright shape along the Seine among the boats and the bridge. There is no drama in it, just the pink of a low sun on the water. The flatness that trained painters mocked in his work is the very thing later artists came to prize. Notice the little boats, each one set down separately, like cut-outs laid on the surface.