Henri Rousseau – Eve in the Garden of Eden

Eve in the Garden of Eden, 1908

A warm, ochre jungle

This canvas is coloured unlike most of Rousseau’s tropical scenes. Instead of cool
blue-greens, ochre, olive and brown dominate; the foliage reads as late summer, almost dried.
A pale yellow disc of sun hangs at the upper centre in a grey-blue sky. Among ferns and fan
palms, pink lotuses open at the left, yellow star-shaped flowers at the right, and a single
orange-red bloom left of centre. Pale yellow pointed blades close the scene at the bottom.

Eve and the serpent

Right of centre stands Eve, nude, her long dark-red hair falling over one shoulder. She
reaches with her left arm toward a branch on which a dark serpent is coiled; a leaf partly
covers her body. The scene is given without drama: no expression of horror or triumph, and Eve
and the snake are set in the same plane as the plants around them. Rousseau signed this canvas
at the lower left with his full name, Henri Julien Rousseau, which is unusual on this
shelf.

A biblical subject in the tropics

Rousseau painted the Garden of Eden as a jungle rather than an orchard, replacing the tree
of knowledge with the growth he knew from the Paris hothouses. That substitution is typical of
his method: he moved subjects out of European painting into a setting he had assembled himself.
The same constructed growth appears in Monkeys and Parrot in the Virgin Forest, there with monkeys and fruit instead of people.

A hothouse instead of the tropics

Rousseau never left France. He studied the plants in the hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes
and the animals in the Paris zoo and in illustrated magazines. 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. That is why the individual
leaves are botanically convincing while their relative proportions are invented: the blades in
front are larger than Eve’s head. The same procedure is in Tropical Forest with Monkeys.

How the tones 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. What is interesting
here is that there is barely any green: the palette is pushed toward ochre and brown, while the
divisions between plants are still made by hue and not by light. The result is a single warm
surface with no pronounced shadow.

Museum and provenance

The painting is held by the Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan, under accession number
002-0004. Japanese collections acquired several important works by Rousseau in the second half
of the twentieth century, so a substantial part of his output is now distributed between
Europe, America and Japan. Another large tropical canvas on our shelf is Tropical Landscape: An American Indian Struggling with a Gorilla.

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. The full range by this painter is in the Henri Rousseau gallery.