Henri Rousseau – Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo

Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo – a hand-painted reproduction

The tiger is low and to the left, its jaws at the buffalo’s throat; the buffalo’s head is
twisted down and back while its body braces against the grass. Both animals sit in the lower
third of the canvas. Above them hang heavy cream-yellow flower clusters on long stems, a tree
at the right carries round orange fruit, and two red blossoms sit high against the only
opening of sky. Broad blade-leaves cross the entire width. There is no horizon and no
distance: the screen of foliage closes the scene immediately behind the animals.

That closure is what separates a Rousseau jungle from a landscape. He did not build depth
with atmospheric perspective but with layers: every leaf is drawn separately, hard-edged, and
the layers overlap until there is nowhere further to look. The result reads like a stage — an
event at the front, a backdrop directly behind it. Anyone who knows Tiger in a Tropical Storm will recognise
the same method ten years earlier, except that there the rain runs across the whole canvas and
gives the picture a direction this one does not have. Here everything is still except two
bodies.

Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo belongs to a run of jungle scenes built the same way.
The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope sets a bright sky against the foliage and lifts the event into the middle of the
canvas; The Repast of the Lion pushes it deeper into the thicket; The Equatorial Jungle drops the animal altogether
and leaves only vegetation, dozens of separate greens. If you want the jungle on a wall as an
event rather than a mood, this is among the most direct motifs on the page.

The colour rests on a contrast: the warm orange of the tiger’s coat and of the fruit against
the cool greens that occupy most of the surface. The cream flower clusters act as points of
light in the upper half and lead the eye down towards the animals. That is also why the motif
carries a wall with a stronger colour or a texture — wood, brick, darker plaster — where a
purely green scene would lose its depth.

How a hand-painted reproduction is made

Every canvas is hand-painted in oil, to order, in the size you choose. We do not reproduce
the measurement of the original: the canvas is fitted to the wall it will hang on. The painter
works from a high-resolution photograph of the original, layer by layer, so that the hard leaf
edges and the transitions in the tiger’s coat stay legible at smaller sizes too. Because this
is handwork, two canvases of the same size are never quite identical — that is not a fault but
the difference between a painting and a print.

Which size for which wall

For a wall above a sofa the rule of thumb is simple: the canvas should reach about two
thirds of the width of the furniture. With this motif it is better to go slightly larger,
because dense foliage flattens optically at small sizes and the individual leaves — the whole
point in Rousseau — disappear. Prices start at 124 EUR for the smallest sizes on this page.