Henri Rousseau – Banana Harvest

Banana Harvest, 1910

A palm grove from edge to edge

The upper two thirds of the canvas are filled by a dense palm grove: thin tall trunks and
feathered fronds overlapping in several layers. A bright gap opens between them at the centre,
showing a white band of sky. The colour is almost monochrome: greens of every shade, from dark
blue-green behind to pale yellowish green on the lit leaves. A band of sandy pale ground runs
along the bottom and closes the composition.

Two figures and a hut

Right of centre stands a hut with a thatched roof in ochre-brown, the only large non-green
plane in the picture. In front of it two dark-skinned figures carry bunches of green bananas
slung on poles across their shoulders: the left one wears a yellow skirt, the right one red.
Two more bunches lie on the ground in the foreground. The scene is one of work and is entirely
calm, without narrative tension; the people are painted in the same plane as the plants.
Rousseau signed the lower right corner, here with his middle initial: Henri J.
Rousseau.

A smaller canvas

At 45.1 x 36.8 cm this is one of the smaller works on our shelf; most of Rousseau’s jungles
are over a metre wide. The smaller format changes the handling too: instead of large individual
leaves that can be counted, the foliage is condensed into a texture the eye reads whole. That is
why a reproduction at a larger size behaves differently from the original, which is worth
knowing in advance for this particular work.

A hothouse instead of the tropics

Rousseau never left France. He studied the plants in the hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes,
and he knew scenes of the colonies from illustrated magazines and exhibitions. He told the
journalist Arsene Alexandre that entering those glasshouses felt like entering a dream, and in
the same conversation admitted he had travelled no further than they were. The banana grove here
is therefore an assembled scene, not an observation. The same procedure is in Tropical Forest with Monkeys.

How the greens were built

Alexandre recorded that Rousseau mixed all the tones of a picture at once before touching the
canvas, and that he had never seen a palette streaming with so many greens. This canvas is the
purest case of that claim on our shelf: almost everything we see is green, and yet the layers
separate clearly. What separates them is hue, not lighting; the yellow and red skirts and the
ochre roof are the only three points that break the unity.

The last year, and the museum

The canvas dates from 1910, Rousseau’s final year; he died on 2 September of that year. The
painting is held by the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven under accession number
2014.60.2. Tropical Landscape: An American Indian Struggling with a Gorilla and Monkeys and Parrot in the Virgin Forest are from the same year, so the three can be read together as one final
season.

Our reproduction

We make this as a hand-painted reproduction in oil on canvas, to order, in the size you
choose. Because it is hand-painted, every copy differs slightly from the last; it is not a
print. The canvas is stretched on a wooden frame and arrives ready to hang. A related jungle
canvas is The Equatorial Jungle. Other works by this painter are in the Henri Rousseau gallery.