Henri Rousseau – Monkeys and Parrot in the Virgin Forest

Monkeys and Parrot in the Virgin Forest, c. 1906–1909

An upright slice of forest

Unlike the large horizontal jungles this canvas is upright and close: the viewer does not
look across the scene but into it, as through a gap between plants. A narrow band of pale blue
sky shows between the branches at the top. A large red flower opens in the middle of the upper
half, with small orange fruits hanging beside it. At the bottom, cream-pale pointed leaves close
the view off.

Monkeys, a parrot and fruit

At the right a white parrot with a red breast sits on a branch. In the centre a brown monkey
hangs from a branch by one arm, and lower left two more monkeys sit among the leaves; both hold
an orange fruit, and both faces are pale and turned straight at the viewer. That frontality is
constant in Rousseau: the animal looks back, as though it were a sitter. He signed this canvas
at the lower left, not the lower right as on most of the shelf.

Dating

The Barnes Foundation does not date the canvas to a single year but to a range, c.
1906-1909, and our table records it the way the museum does. The painting measures 47.3 x
56.2 cm and carries the accession number BF397. Comparable dense growth appears in The Equatorial Jungle.

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. The monkeys and the parrot
here are therefore closely observed animals set into a landscape that exists nowhere. The same
procedure is in The Repast of the Lion.

How the greens 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. On this small canvas
the effect is concentrated: dark blue-green branches, mid-green ferns and pale yellowish leaves
below are separated by hue rather than by lighting. The same handling is in Tropical Landscape: An American Indian Struggling with a Gorilla.

The Barnes collection

Albert C. Barnes assembled the largest group of Rousseau’s work in America, so this picture is
read alongside more than a dozen others under one roof in Philadelphia. Among the larger jungle
canvases on our shelf see Negro Attacked by a Jaguar.

Motifs that repeat

The monkey, the parrot and the round orange fruit return through Rousseau’s jungles as fixed
properties, moved from canvas to canvas and arranged differently each time. He exhibited at the
Salon des Independants in almost every year from 1886 onwards, and the series was built up slowly
in front of the same public. It is the repetition that gives the jungles their effect of a
closed, self-consistent world: these are not separate scenes so much as one place seen from
another position.

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