Vista dal ponte di Grenelle, Trocadéro

Henri Rousseau spent his working life as a clerk on the Paris toll gates, checking goods as they came into the city, and painted in his free hours with no formal training. This is his Paris, looked at from the Pont de Grenelle across the Seine in 1891. There is no Impressionist shimmer on the water. He gives you the river flat and grey, chimneys and towers ranged along the far bank under a low sky, a barge, a run of quay, everything set down with the plain, patient care of a man who trusts each fact he can see. That same year, this careful clerk sent something very different to the independent artists' show, his first jungle, a tiger caught in a tropical storm.