Description
| Year of creation: | 1909 |
| Original size: | 129.5 cm x 140.6 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA |
The Equatorial Jungle, 1909
The Equatorial Jungle is one of the last of Rousseau’s large forest canvases, painted a year before his death. The work belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which received it from the Chester Dale collection.
A forest with no protagonist
Unlike the tigers and the lions, no single animal holds this scene together. The view closes into a wall of leaves, and only after looking for a while do small figures emerge from it. Rousseau built the depth in bands: a lower register of large leaves, a middle register of trunks behind it, and at the very back a lighter opening through which the sun falls. Because there is no aerial perspective, the forest reads as close and endless at the same time. It is often stated that he used more than fifty distinct greens on this canvas; we cannot source that figure to a primary, though the observation about the range of greens holds without it. To see where the method began, look at Tiger in a Tropical Storm.
A hothouse instead of the tropics
Rousseau never saw a tropical forest. Everything he needed he found in the Paris hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes, in botanical atlases and in illustrated magazines. He said himself that when he entered the glasshouse and saw the strange plants from exotic countries it seemed to him he had walked into a dream. That is why his jungle is exact in its parts and impossible as a whole: the individual leaves are recognisable species, the relations between them are not. The same procedure, carried to its conclusion, is visible in The Dream.
The hand-painted reproduction
The work is transferred to canvas in oil, in oil on canvas, in the size you choose. The painter works from the original, so the layers of green are laid down in the same order as in the source. 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 jungle scene with animals is The Merry Jesters. The same dense palm foliage, stacked in layers, is Banana Harvest.
- Motif: dense tropical undergrowth with a light opening behind
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted
- Sizes: from 50 x 55 cm to 150 x 160 cm
- Point of interest: the original measures 129.5 x 140.6 cm and is among the last works before the painter’s death in 1910
