Description
| Year: | 1908 |
| Original size: | 46 cm x 55 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (primitivism), post-impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia |
In a Tropical Forest: Struggle between Tiger and Bull – a hand-painted reproduction
The tiger comes down from the left onto a grey bull whose head is forced to the ground.
Both sit low in the picture and are crossed over by long blades of grass, so the fight is not
displayed but half-screened: you see it through the grass rather than in front of it. A dense
vertical band of drooping cream-yellow flower clusters runs down the centre-left. Slender
branches carry round orange fruit to the left and right of centre. High on the right, three
red blossoms sit against genuinely open blue sky. Loose grass sweeps the lower third, and
three fallen orange fruits lie along the bottom edge.
A scene that hides — and what that means on a wall
That screening is the difference between this canvas and Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo, which carries the
same year. There the animals sit clear in the lower third; here you have to find them. The
motif therefore behaves differently in a room: it does not ask for distance, it asks for
closeness. It reads best on a wall you walk past or sit near — a hallway, beside a desk,
above a low chest — where the eye has time to work out what is happening in the grass. As a
single canvas above a sofa, seen from three metres, the scene fuses into a green surface and
the point of it is lost.
Two canvases from the same year
The records for both works give 1908 and both show a tiger and a bovine. We claim nothing
beyond that: which came first, whether either is a study for the other, and why the subject
was painted twice are not stated by the sources we cite, so we will not state them either.
What can be compared is the construction, and it differs more than two works from one season
might lead you to expect. Related handling appears in Tiger in a Tropical Storm, where the rain gives the
picture a direction, and in Monkeys and Parrot in the Virgin Forest, where the animals are not attacking at all but
watching.
A small canvas that behaves like a large one
The original measures 46 cm x 55 cm. That is unusually small for a jungle scene — less
than half the width of many of Rousseau’s rainforest canvases — and it is exactly why every
leaf here is drawn so precisely: at that size he could not afford a flat area. We do not
reproduce the original measurement; you choose the size for your wall. If you want to see the
same method at large format, it is visible in The Equatorial Jungle.
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 overlapping
blades and the transitions in the tiger’s coat stay legible at smaller sizes. 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. Prices start at 124 EUR for the smallest sizes
on this page.
The record
Painted 1908, oil on canvas, 46 cm x 55 cm, held by the Hermitage Museum in Saint
Petersburg. We give the style in two parts — naive art (primitivism), post-impressionist
period — because the first says how Rousseau painted and the second only when.
Post-impressionism is a period, not his style. We make no claim about which wall of the
museum the canvas hangs on today: that changes, and we cannot verify it.
