Henri Rousseau – Eve and the Serpent

Eve and the Serpent – a hand-painted reproduction

A pale standing nude is seen in profile, facing left, her very long dark brown hair
falling in a heavy mass past her hip. She extends her near arm; a blue-green snake with a
pale belly comes down out of the leaves from the left, its head level with her open hand,
and an orange-yellow fruit sits between the snake’s mouth and her palm. That exchange is the
centre of the picture. The snake’s body winds in a long slack curve down a dark upright
trunk. Around them is dense dark-green growth: palm fronds, spiked leaves, a tree at the
upper left carrying round orange fruit on thin pinnate branches, and more fruit scattered
low. Dark trunks stand at the left and right edges and frame the scene. At the top runs a
band of pale blue sky with salmon-pink cloud. The weave of the canvas shows through the thin
paint.

The exchange that holds the picture together

Everything in this canvas leads to one point: the hand and the fruit. The figure looks
towards it, the snake is aimed at it, even the branches run in towards it. That is why the
scene survives at a small size – the eye finds the centre at once. The comparison with
The Snake Charmer is instructive: there the nude is painted as an almost complete silhouette and
the snakes wind around her, while here the body is the brightest area in the picture and the
snake keeps its distance. The same subject, the opposite solution.

The only upright canvas in this group

Among the works this shelf carries, this is one of the few in portrait format: 62 cm x
46 cm. That matters for a wall. An upright format works where width is short – between
windows, beside a door, above a narrow chest – where a landscape canvas such as The Dream
or Exotic Landscape would ask for more wall than there is. The planting here is also denser and
darker than in most of the jungle scenes, so the canvas feels more concentrated and less
panoramic. For the opposite case, where the planting opens up and the scene breathes, look at The Equatorial Jungle.

Why there is no year on this page

The record we work from does not give a year. It gives a decade rather than a date, and a
second caption attached to the same photograph points to a different time altogether. Rather
than pick one of those and print it as fact, we give no year anywhere – not even a “circa”.
The specification table therefore says the work is not securely dated. That is the only
place this belongs. Everything else on this page – the measurements, the technique, the
collection and the inventory number – comes from the record and is not guessed at.

How a hand-painted reproduction is made

Every canvas is hand-painted in oil, to order, in the size you choose. The painter works
from a high-resolution photograph of the original, layer by layer, so that the transitions
in the hair, the bright plane of the body and the blue-green snake stay readable even at
smaller sizes. Because this is handwork, two canvases of the same size are always slightly
different; that is not a fault but the difference between a painting and a print. Prices
start at 124 EUR for the smallest sizes on this page.