Le rive della Bièvre presso Bicêtre

The Bievre was a small river on the southern edge of Paris, and by Rousseau's day it was badly polluted, lined for centuries with tanneries and dye works. He painted its banks near Bicetre around 1908 as something calm and green, with figures in peasant dress on a tree-lined path and the arches of a 17th-century aqueduct in the distance. Rousseau was self-taught, a former Paris toll collector who took up painting seriously only in middle age, which is why critics of his time dismissed his work as naive. He pinned a handwritten note to the back naming the spot, and in 1909 he handed the canvas to the dealer Ambroise Vollard to sell. The Bievre itself is gone from view now, covered over and running through pipes beneath the streets of the city.