O Barco-Lavanderia da Ponte de Charenton

Rousseau painted this in 1895, while he was still working as a toll collector on the edge of Paris — the day job that earned him the nickname 'the Customs Officer,' Le Douanier. Charenton, where the Marne runs into the Seine, was the kind of place his rounds took him: a working river lined with mills and factory chimneys. What sits on the water is a bateau-lavoir, a floating wash-house where women came to do their laundry. Rousseau, self-taught and painting on Sundays, set it all down flat and still and slightly toy-like, the trees rising in neat green plumes and the smokestacks answering them along the bank. The trained painters of his day took this for clumsiness. 13 years later Picasso and his friends threw him a famous banquet in their run-down Montmartre studio — a building the artists there had nicknamed the Bateau-Lavoir, after the very laundry boats Rousseau liked to paint.