Henri Rousseau – The Cliff

This painting may strike you as oddly familiar — especially if you've visited the Musée d'Orsay, since it echoes the mood of Courbet's The Stormy Sea (Étretat). Most paintings of Étretat tend to share this kind of resemblance, since Rousseau based this work on landscapes of the Normandy coast that other painters of the era had already produced.

Living in an age with no concept of work-life balance, Rousseau — who spent over twenty years as a salaried employee — had little chance to travel out to the Paris countryside himself. So he turned to other artists' paintings for reference and filled in the rest with his own imagination. The result isn't an especially remarkable painting on its own terms, but it holds a special place as one of the very few seascapes Rousseau ever painted.