Description
| Year of creation: | 1891 |
| Original size: | 162 cm x 130 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The National Gallery, London |
Tiger in a Tropical Storm, 1891
Tiger in a Tropical Storm is Rousseau’s first jungle painting and the starting point of everything he is now known for. The 1891 canvas belongs to the National Gallery in London, where it hangs under its original title, Surprised!
A scene lit by lightning
The tiger gathers itself in tall grass while every branch and blade bends one way, as though pressed by wind. Rousseau painted the rain as thin silver strokes drawn straight across the whole surface, and the animal is lit by the lightning rather than by any sun. Rousseau was about forty-seven when he painted it and still working for the Paris toll service; he gave himself to painting entirely only after retiring in 1893. The rain was laid over the finished surface, so the silver strokes sit above the foliage rather than beneath it, and the eye is placed low, among the blades, as though the viewer were crouched in the grass facing the animal. What the tiger is actually hunting is not shown; the title Surprised! leaves the question open and the literature has never settled it. An equally taut encounter with a beast appears in The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope.
The first jungle, assembled in Paris
In 1891 Rousseau had not yet painted a single jungle. He studied the plants in the hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes and knew the tiger from the zoo and from illustrated magazines. The result is a landscape that exists nowhere: the leaves are botanically exact but combined in proportions nature does not produce. The critic Félix Vallotton wrote of the picture at the Salon des Indépendants that it could not be passed by, at a time when most of the press was still treating Rousseau as a joke. How he developed the same method further is clearest in The Equatorial Jungle.
The hand-painted reproduction
Your canvas is begun only after the order, onto gallery canvas in the size you choose. The painter works from the original, so the colour values and the brushwork belong to this reproduction rather than to any impression of it. The canvas arrives stretched on a wooden stretcher frame and ready to hang. The full range is in the Henri Rousseau gallery, and the nearest feline subject is The Tiger Cat. The same beast at the moment of attack appears in Scouts Attacked by a Tiger.
- Motif: a tiger in tall grass in a tropical storm, lit by lightning
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted
- Sizes: from 70 x 60 cm to 200 x 160 cm
- Point of interest: this is Rousseau’s first jungle painting; every later one, The Dream included, descends from it
