Description
| Year: | 1910 |
| Original size: | 130.2 cm x 162.6 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (primitivism), post-impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, USA |
Exotic Landscape – a hand-painted reproduction
The scene is a daylight one: the sky is a pale blue-green and the foliage is lit
throughout. At the left a tree carries round orange fruit among dark pinnate leaves. Two tan
monkeys with pale pink faces climb a slanting pale trunk; both are turned squarely out to
the viewer, arms raised into the branches. Below them the arms of a third animal reach up
out of the grass, one hand closed around an orange fruit. Right of centre a large
grey-furred animal with a black face sits upright in the grass and holds a round orange
fruit to its mouth with both hands. At the lower left are broad pale pink flowers with
yellow centres, and beside them leaves painted as flat black silhouettes. Across the lower
centre a band of red tubular flowers stands against a dark red-brown mass. At the right rise
a white upright flower spike and a broad palm rosette. Tall strap-shaped grass runs along
the whole bottom edge.
Animals that look back
What is unusual is that the animals are not doing anything. Both monkeys on the trunk are
turned out of the picture straight at you, and so is the large grey animal. The scene does
not narrate an event – it catches you: you are the one who has been noticed. The same device
with a different outcome appears in Monkeys and Parrot in the Virgin Forest, where the animals are genuinely occupied and
the attention stays inside the picture. That is why Exotic Landscape works well opposite a
doorway or behind a desk – anywhere it makes sense for something to look back at you.
Daylight, not night
The light is even and shadowless and the colours are full: orange, red, white and a whole
scale of greens. It is the opposite of The Snake Charmer, where a pale moon pushes everything into
silhouette, and a step on from The Equatorial Jungle, where the thicket is bright but almost empty of
animals. If you want a motif that opens a room rather than darkening it, this is among the
better ones on this shelf. On a wall it reads as a window into bright green, not as a dark
panel.
The size of the original, and yours
The original measures 130.2 cm x 162.6 cm. It is a large canvas, and that is exactly why
it holds so much separated detail – every fruit, every flower and every blade is drawn on
its own. We do not copy canvases at their original size; you choose the size for your wall.
With this motif we would lean towards a larger size, because at a small one you lose the
very details that make the picture live. To see how the same process handles a scene built
on a single dramatic gesture, look at Tiger in a Tropical Storm.
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 monkeys’
faces, the edges of the black leaves and the red flowers 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.
