Henri Rousseau – View of the Île de la Cité, Paris

View of the Île de la Cité, Paris, c. 1893

A sky on fire

The upper half of the canvas is taken by a sky in orange-red tones that darkens from the
horizon upwards towards a rusty red. The brushstrokes are visible and run diagonally, so
that the sky is not a smooth plane but a worked field. This is Rousseau’s city view at dusk:
the colour of the sky is the strongest element in the picture and everything below it is
dark against it. A comparable evening key appears on our shelf in A Carnival Evening.

The island as a dark silhouette

Against that sky the island lies as one dark mass. Out of it rise a dome at the left, a
tall thin spire near the centre, and two square towers to its right. Along the upper edge of
the embankment runs a serrated band of trees that finishes the mass like the edge of a comb.
Among the buildings two French tricolours fly from poles, one above the dome and one nearer
the centre.

The lights

Small warm yellow-orange dots are scattered across the dark mass – lit windows and lamps.
They are not set out in regular rows but singly, as though each had been lit on its own
account. It is they that say this is a city and not a hill: without them the silhouette
would be no more than a black shape against a sky.

The bridge and the reflections

A stone bridge with three visible arches spans the full width of the canvas, painted in a
pale grey-brown. Below it the water is dark, and long vertical bands of reflection run down
it – Rousseau paints lamplight not as little discs but as trembling lines that reach deep
into the water. That is why the lower part of the picture is not still; it reads as a
faintly moving surface.

Two people on the quay

A pale quay rises diagonally from the lower left corner. Two small dark figures in hats
stand on it, turned towards one another as if in conversation; one of them holds a stick.
Behind them is a dark conical shape. These two are the only people on the canvas, and they
are placed exactly on the pale plane, so that we see them as cut-out outlines.

The museum and the record

The original is held by the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill under object number
77.38.1. The museum dates it to about 1893, gives the medium as oil on canvas and the
measurements as 81 x 100.5 cm. The work was bought through the Ackland Fund in honour of
Joseph C. Sloane, the museum’s first director, and the record also states that it was given
conservation treatment in 2008. A suburban subject in our series is Outskirts of Paris, and a park
subject is Jardin du Luxembourg.

How we make this canvas

We make the picture as a hand-painted oil on canvas reproduction, to order and in the size
you choose. The hardest passage in this subject is the sky: from the light orange at the
horizon to the dark rusty red at the top it has to run without visible steps, or the
silhouette peels away from its background. The small lights go on last, once the dark mass
is dry. Because the work is done by hand, every copy differs a little from the last. A river
bank from the same series is The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre. The full range is in the Henri Rousseau gallery.