Description
| Year of creation: | n/a |
| Original size: | n/a |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Private Collection |
The Tiger Cat
The Tiger Cat is the work on this shelf about which least is known. It circulates under Rousseau’s name and is held in a private collection, but we could find neither a museum record nor a catalogue entry for it, and for that reason we give neither a date nor the dimensions of the original.
What the picture shows, and what we do not know
The scene is plain and compact: a tabby-marked cat placed frontally, with large eyes looking straight out of the canvas. That frontal placement is characteristic of Rousseau; the tiger in Tiger in a Tropical Storm meets the viewer just as directly. On the documentation, though, we have to be candid. Every source we located is a commercial reproduction catalogue rather than a museum or scholarly record. A private collection publishes nothing by definition, so the year and the measurements remain unconfirmed. We would rather say so than invent a figure.
Rousseau and his animals
Rousseau did not paint animals from life. He went to the Paris zoo and to the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy, copied from illustrated magazines and postcards, and then set the animal into a space he had constructed himself. His cats are therefore observed and invented at the same time: the fur is exact, while the pose is more an idea of a cat than a record of one. The same approach governs the large jungle canvases, for instance The Merry Jesters, where the animal holds the centre and the foliage around it is assembled from separately painted leaves. It was precisely this method that led Picasso and his circle to hold a banquet in Rousseau’s honour in 1908.
The hand-painted reproduction
The reproduction is painted by a person, in oil, to order, in the size you choose. Because the original is not publicly accessible and its measurements are unconfirmed, the painter works from the best available reproduction of the motif, and the proportions are fitted to the format you select. The canvas arrives stretched on a wooden stretcher frame and ready to hang. Other works by this painter are in the Henri Rousseau gallery, and the nearest jungle subject is The Equatorial Jungle. Another single animal, painted close up and outside the jungle series, is The Rabbit’s Meal.
- Motif: a tabby-marked cat, placed frontally
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted to order
- Sizes: from 40 x 60 cm to 150 x 210 cm
- Point of interest: this is the only work on this shelf with no confirmed date or dimensions; we list it as a privately held work whose attribution we could not verify
