Description
| Year of creation: | 1910 |
| Original size: | 150.2 cm x 116.2 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The Art Institute of Chicago |
The Waterfall, 1910
A lighter jungle
This is one of the brightest of Rousseau’s jungles. A pale blue sky sits at the top, and
sand-coloured hills rise behind the growth. At the left a large tree carries rounded blue-green
leaves on dark branches; fan palms and tall cream cross-shaped flowers stand at the centre;
pink lotuses and a dense shrub of crimson-red leaves open at the right. The scale is cool and
high-keyed, without the black shadows of his night pictures.
The waterfall, the antelope and two figures
At the lower left a narrow white fall of water drops between dark rocks; the picture takes
its title from it. Two golden-brown antelope stand on the bank, one of them horned, both turned
towards the water. Beside the trunk at the left are two dark human figures, one standing behind
the tree and one seated by a rock; they are only noticed once the eye stops following the
leaves. Rousseau signed the lower right corner and added the year.
The last year
The canvas dates from 1910, Rousseau’s final year; he died on 2 September of that year.
Tropical Landscape: An American Indian Struggling with a Gorilla comes from the same year and is also a large jungle canvas, so the two can be read
together as statements of one season. The Art Institute of Chicago received the painting with
the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection; the reference number is 1926.262.
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 same constructed world appears
in The Repast of the Lion.
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 the greens
are arranged by depth: a blue-green canopy in front, mid-green fans in the middle, pale greenish
hills behind. What separates them is hue, not lighting. The same handling is in Tiger in a Tropical Storm.
The route to Chicago
The painting entered the Art Institute of Chicago in 1926 as part of the collection Frederic
Clay Bartlett gave in memory of his wife, Helen Birch Bartlett. The same gift brought the museum
several central works of late nineteenth and early twentieth century French painting, so
Rousseau’s jungle hangs in Chicago not as an isolated curiosity but inside a group assembled
with a clear idea. The reference number 1926.262 carries that year.
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 The Equatorial Jungle. The full range is in the Henri Rousseau gallery.
