Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau (so nicknamed because he originally made his living as a customs official) was a self-taught artist whose voracious borrowings from popular culture and naïve, simple style were key influences on the development of Cubism. This fantastical image of an abandoned castle silhouetted against the night sky, typical of his work, is characterized by the simplified, hard-edged modeling of forms that Picasso and Braque would adopt in their own early Cubist paintings.

The castle depicted here is based on an actual location – the château of Falaise, in Normandy. Rousseau did not paint it from life; as was his usual practice, he probably worked from a photograph or a guidebook illustration.  The lack of direct observation allowed him to introduce tantalizing ambiguities into the composition. The pale diagonal at lower center could be either a path, the top of a wall or moonlight shining on a hillside.  The cottages in the foreground appear disproportionately large in comparison to the castle above, and a twinkling constellation appears to shine too brightly in a blue sky cushioned by clouds. In doing so, he transformed a tourist cliché into a mysterious, poetic and faintly menacing image.