Description
| Year of creation: | 1906 |
| Original size: | 113.4 cm x 145.8 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA |
The Merry Jesters, 1906
The Merry Jesters is the Rousseau jungle that most invites the viewer to hunt through it. The 1906 work belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and measures 113.4 x 145.8 cm.
Monkeys that look back
A group of monkeys hides in the undergrowth, and they do not behave like animals in a natural-history plate: one holds a stick, another a bottle, a third looks straight out at the viewer. Rousseau composed the scene so that the first glance registers only foliage and the monkeys appear afterwards; that delay is a large part of why the painting is so liked. What they are doing, and whether the joke is on the viewer, stays open and the literature does not agree. A comparably dense green wall, without animals, is The Equatorial Jungle.
How Rousseau assembled undergrowth
Rousseau had not been to the tropics and never pretended otherwise. He studied the plants in the Paris hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes and knew monkeys from the zoo and from illustrated magazines. He built the foliage layer by layer, leaf by leaf, which gives the picture the look of stage scenery: a band in front, a band behind, and the figures between them. That is why his jungles are recognisable from across a room even though none of them can be found on a map. The same method at its largest scale is The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope, where the scene fills almost three metres of canvas.
The hand-painted reproduction
Each copy is an independent oil painting to order, on gallery canvas, in the size you choose. The painter works from the original; because this motif depends on the relation between foliage and figures, 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 scene with a human figure is Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest. The same monkeys among the foliage, in a lighter register, appear in Tropical Forest with Monkeys.
- Motif: a group of monkeys in tropical foliage, one looking straight out
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted to order
- Sizes: from 50 x 65 cm to 150 x 190 cm
- Point of interest: the monkeys emerge only after the leaves, a delay of attention Rousseau builds deliberately
