Description
| Year of creation: | c. 1907 |
| Original size: | 160.0 cm x 113.7 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
The Repast of the Lion, c. 1907
Twilight in a blue-green jungle
The canvas is pitched cool: blue-green vegetation, and among it a pale sun settling behind
low hills at the centre. At the left a large white feathered flower rises out of a dark green
rosette. Yellow hanging blooms like banana flowers are set to left and right, and between them
open deep blue lotuses and a single salmon-pink flower. Rousseau signed the lower right
corner.
The lion and its prey
Just below centre, among tall blades, a lion crouches facing the viewer and tears at a
spotted animal held beneath it. Its face is painted frontally and calmly, almost as a portrait;
the violence is given without movement and without noise. That stillness is what separates
Rousseau’s beasts from the romantic hunting tradition. The same quiet reckoning appears in
The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope.
Dating and the museum record
The Metropolitan Museum dates the canvas c. 1907 rather than to an exact year, and
our table records it the way the museum does. The painting measures 160.0 x 113.7 cm and
entered the collection in 1951 as the bequest of Sam A. Lewisohn. The accession number is
51.112.5.
A hothouse instead of the tropics
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. 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 leaves are
botanically convincing while their proportions are invented: the flowers in the foreground are
larger than the lion’s head. The same constructed world appears in Scouts Attacked by a Tiger.
How the greens were built
Alexandre recorded that Rousseau 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. Here that
method is at its clearest: the whole picture is built from cool greens and blues that differ in
hue rather than in lighting. The surface is smooth, the brushwork barely visible, the leaf
edges cut sharp. The same handling is in Tropical Landscape: An American Indian Struggling with a Gorilla.
Defenders among the younger painters
In the years around 1907 Rousseau’s standing was slowly changing. Robert Delaunay and his
mother commissioned a large jungle canvas from him, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote about him with
sympathy, and in 1908 Picasso held the now-famous evening in his honour at the Bateau-Lavoir.
Official criticism stayed mocking long after his death; it was these younger artists who
recognised in his beasts and hothouses something more than the awkwardness of a self-taught
man.
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. A related jungle
canvas is Tiger in a Tropical Storm. Other works by this painter are in the Henri Rousseau gallery.
