Description
| Year of creation: | 1908 |
| Original size: | 61.2 cm x 50.0 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia |
The Rabbit’s Meal, 1908
A wall instead of a jungle
This is not a tropical scene. The upper two thirds of the canvas are filled by a red brick
wall, painted brick by brick with dark brown joints. A dark trunk grows at the right, and from
it a branch of pale green, finger-shaped leaves bends across the top edge of the picture. Small
dark green plants grow at the foot of the wall. The setting is a Paris back garden, not a
rainforest, and that domesticity is what sets it apart from everything else on our shelf.
A rabbit, a cabbage and carrots
At the centre a grey-and-white rabbit crouches in profile, one ear up, nibbling the feathery
tops of a carrot. A large pale green cabbage lies at the left, and two bright orange carrots sit
in the foreground. The ground is sandy and empty. Every object is placed apart from every other,
so the canvas works at once as a genre scene and as a still life. Rousseau signed the lower
right corner and added the year 1908.
Animals without beasts
Rousseau’s animals are usually imagined as tigers and lions, but he painted far more domestic
ones. The rabbit here is treated with exactly the frontal calm of his big cats: no movement, no
anecdote, set in the same plane as the cabbage and the carrots. The same steady gaze is in The Repast of the Lion,
except that there the meal is in a lion’s paws.
Where it was made
In this period Rousseau lived and worked in Paris in modest circumstances, and he also painted
smaller subjects that were easier to sell. He studied plants in the hothouses of the Jardin des
Plantes; here he needed no hothouse, since a brick wall, a cabbage and carrots were to hand. It
is that proximity which makes the drawing here more exact than in any of the jungle canvases –
the individual bricks can be counted. The opposite case is Rendezvous in the Forest.
How the surface is built
Arsene Alexandre recorded that Rousseau mixed all the tones of a picture at once before
touching the canvas. On this small canvas that means the red of the wall, the grey of the rabbit,
the pale green of the cabbage and the orange of the carrots are four separate, independent
planes; none is subordinated to a common light. The surface is smooth, the edges sharp, and
there is almost no shadow.
The Barnes collection
The painting is held by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia under accession number BF578.
Albert C. Barnes assembled the largest group of Rousseau’s work in America, containing both the
large jungles and small domestic subjects, which shows how wide his range actually was. Another
work from the same collection on our shelf is Monkeys and Parrot in the Virgin Forest, and an earlier Paris subject is The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre.
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.
