Description
| Year of creation: | 1901 |
| Original size: | 129.5 cm x 193.2 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania |
Mauvaise surprise, 1901
Mauvaise surprise, usually given in English as Unpleasant Surprise, is one of the few Rousseau forest paintings in which the undergrowth opens not onto a calm dream but onto a moment of sudden danger. The canvas was painted in 1901 and belongs to the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania.
What is happening in the picture
A nude female figure stands in the foreground, a bear rears immediately beside her, and a hunter fires from among the trunks behind. Rousseau set the scene in an upright format almost two metres tall, which places the viewer among the trees rather than in front of them. What the scene means remains open: part of the literature reads it as a hunting accident, part as an allegory of the meeting between people and nature. Both readings are still in circulation and neither is settled, so we give it here as contested. Anyone drawn to Rousseau’s figures set into landscape will find a related scene in The Sleeping Gypsy, where a lion approaches a sleeping figure.
How Rousseau built a forest
Rousseau never left France and never saw any of the forests he painted. He studied plants in the Paris hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes, in botanical books and in illustrated magazines, and animals at the zoo and on postcards. That is why his undergrowth reads as precise and impossible at once: every leaf is painted separately, while the whole is assembled rather than observed. The same method is plain in Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest. His contemporaries took this for ignorance; Picasso and the circle around him recognised it instead as an independent way of building pictorial space.
The hand-painted reproduction
Every canvas is painted by hand in oil, made to order, in the size you choose. The painter works from the original, so colour values and brushwork differ from a print: the reproduction is a new painting, not an impression. The canvas arrives stretched on a wooden stretcher frame and ready to hang. The full range by this painter is in the Henri Rousseau gallery, and the nearest forest subject is Negro Attacked by a Jaguar. A solitary female figure standing in dense vegetation also appears in Eve in the Garden of Eden.
- Motif: a forest scene with a female figure, a bear and a hunter behind
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted to order
- Sizes: from 50 x 75 cm to 130 x 193 cm
- Point of interest: the original measures 129.5 x 193.2 cm and stands upright, unusual for Rousseau’s forest scenes, which are mostly horizontal
