Description
| Year of creation: | 1904 |
| Original size: | 161.9 cm x 121.6 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia |
Scouts Attacked by a Tiger, 1904
A night attack in tall grass
The scene is set at dusk. A pale moon hangs above the black silhouettes of palms and ferns,
with the sky behind them still grey-blue. At the left a horse rears and throws its rider, a
scout in white uniform and white helmet, backwards out of the saddle; Rousseau draws the lance
as a single diagonal across the centre of the canvas. From the right a tiger comes down through
the blades, jaws wide, one yellow eye showing. Between them, just below centre, a second scout
in white lies on his back among broad green leaves. Rousseau signed the lower right corner.
A jungle assembled in Paris
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. In 1910 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. That is why the foliage here
is botanically convincing while the proportions are invented: the blades in the foreground are
larger than the tiger. The same constructed jungle appears in Tiger in a Tropical Storm.
1904, and where Rousseau stood
Rousseau was sixty when he painted this canvas. He had left his post at the Paris toll office
in 1893 and only then turned to painting full time; the nickname Le Douanier is
therefore inaccurate, as he himself later corrected. He showed his animal pictures at the Salon
des Independants, where the early criticism was mocking, even as younger painters were beginning
to defend him. A comparable meeting of man and beast is The Equatorial Jungle.
How the painting reached Philadelphia
The canvas is held by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia under accession number BF584.
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 2025 and 2026 it was shown in an
exhibition at the Barnes and then at the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris. Among the larger jungle
canvases see also The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope, and for the first of them all, Negro Attacked by a Jaguar.
How the greens were built
Arsene Alexandre, who visited Rousseau in his studio, recorded that the painter 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. That is exactly what is visible here: the foreground leaves, the
dark canopy and the blades around the fallen scout are separated by a dozen different greens
rather than by light and shade. The surface is smooth, the brushwork barely visible, and the
leaf edges are cut sharp, which gives the scene its still, almost decorative tension.
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 is in the Henri Rousseau gallery.
