Description
| Year of creation: | 1905 |
| Original size: | 301 cm x 200 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Beyeler Foundation, Basel, Switzerland |
The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope, 1905
The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope was, until The Dream, the largest canvas Rousseau ever painted, and the work with which he first entered the centre of the Paris argument about art. It measures 301 x 200 cm and belongs to the Fondation Beyeler in Basel.
The painting that gave Fauvism its name
The canvas hung at the Salon d’Automne of 1905, in the same room as works by Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck. The critic Louis Vauxcelles described the room as a cage of wild beasts, a cage aux fauves, and from that remark the name Fauvism was born. The irony is complete: an entire movement takes its name from a room in which the only literal wild beast was the one in Rousseau’s picture, and he was not a Fauve and never wished to be. The title he gave it himself was a long description of the scene rather than a short label. An earlier and more contained encounter with a beast is Tiger in a Tropical Storm. Rousseau was sixty-one at the time of that Salon and had been exhibiting for nearly twenty years, mostly without an echo. This canvas was the first large enough to be impossible to overlook: in a room full of young painters working in strong colour, the retired toll officer hung a hunting scene two metres high and found himself at the centre of an attention he had not sought.
How the scene is built
The lion has taken hold of an antelope that is still standing; around them the undergrowth is painted as scenery in several layers, and in the branches wait birds and smaller animals that only a closer look finds. Rousseau did not build the scene on dramatic movement but on stillness: both animals are almost motionless, and the tension is carried by the light behind them, a red sun low on the horizon. The same arrangement, without the beasts, is visible in The Dream.
The hand-painted reproduction
A painter executes this motif by hand, in oil on canvas to order. The painter works from the original; because the source is exceptionally wide, the proportions are held at smaller formats so that the composition stays whole. The canvas arrives stretched on a wooden stretcher frame and ready to hang. The full range is in the Henri Rousseau gallery, and a related jungle scene with monkeys is The Merry Jesters. The same lion at its prey, in a stiller moment, is The Repast of the Lion.
- Motif: a lion and an antelope in undergrowth, with a red sun on the horizon
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted to order
- Sizes: from 90 x 60 cm to 301 x 200 cm
- Point of interest: shown in the room that gave Fauvism its name, though Rousseau was not a Fauve
