Henri Rousseau – The Chair Factory

This painting is often exhibited alongside another of a different size sharing the same subject: the landscape around a chair factory. The version with the dark clouds is somewhat smaller than its companion piece.

In both versions, the human figures are rendered strikingly small — small enough that it starts to look less like a simple consequence of lacking formal training and more like a deliberate disregard for conventional rules. Rousseau, in fact, worked something like a medieval painter: he enlarged whatever he judged most important and shrank the rest.