Description
| Year of creation: | 1910 |
| Original size: | 162.5 cm x 116 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland |
Forêt vierge au soleil couchant, 1910
Forêt vierge au soleil couchant, virgin forest at sunset, is one of the last of Rousseau’s jungle canvases. The 1910 work belongs to the Kunstmuseum Basel and measures 162.5 x 116 cm. We also list it under an older descriptive title that remains in circulation in many catalogues.
The last light over the undergrowth
The scene shows a beast attacking in dense tropical undergrowth, set at the moment the sun is going down and the sky behind the leaves turns orange. Rousseau used the light as a backdrop rather than as a source that would cast shadows; figures and plants are lit evenly and the outlines stay sharp even in the distance. That is why the scene reads like a cut-out of stage scenery on which the curtain has just risen. A comparable encounter with a beast at larger scale is The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope. The title of this work differs between sources, and our own pages carry more than one form of it: the museum today uses the French landscape name while older catalogues use the descriptive title with the jaguar, so we give both here.
A landscape built, not observed
None of this undergrowth was seen by the painter at first hand. He studied the plants in the Paris hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes and the beasts at the zoo and in illustrations. He built the foliage layer by layer, leaf by leaf, with no aerial perspective. That is why his jungles are recognisable from across a room even though none can be found on a map. The same procedure without an event is The Equatorial Jungle.
The hand-painted reproduction
The picture is carried out in classical oil technique, to order, in the size you choose. The painter works from the original; because the scene depends on the relation between beasts and foliage, the proportions are held at smaller formats. The canvas arrives stretched on a wooden stretcher frame and ready to hang, without an added frame. The full range is in the Henri Rousseau gallery, and a related forest figure is Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest. The same struggle of a man with a beast, also from 1910, is Tropical Landscape: An American Indian Struggling with a Gorilla.
- Motif: a beast attacking in tropical undergrowth at sunset
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted to order
- Sizes: from 70 x 60 cm to 200 x 140 cm
- Point of interest: the museum lists the work under its French landscape title today, older sources under the descriptive one
