Description
| Year of creation: | 1910 |
| Original size: | 162.5 cm x 129.5 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | National Gallery of Art, Washington |
Tropical Forest with Monkeys, 1910
A pale sky above feathered palms
A pale blue-green sky opens at the top, and feathered palm fronds spread across it in a thin
net. The colour is markedly lighter here than in his night jungles: mid and pale greens dominate,
without black shadows. At the left of the foreground stands a dense shrub of wine-red leaves,
the strongest colour note on the whole canvas, and beside it white water lilies open on thin
stems. Yellow-orange bird-of-paradise flowers grow at the right.
Five monkeys and a bird
At the centre a grey monkey with a white ruff round its face sits on a branch, holding a thin
rod. Upper right, two orange-brown monkeys hang from a branch with their arms outstretched.
Lower right, a large orange-brown monkey stands on a rock at the water’s edge, turned straight at
the viewer. A dark bird flies at the upper left. All five animals are painted calmly and
frontally, without movement; the scene is an arrangement rather than an event. 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
and The Waterfall are from the same year, so the three can be read together as the close of a single
season. He completed several large jungle canvases in those months, none of them from nature,
since he never left France.
A hothouse instead of the tropics
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 foliage is botanically convincing while the proportions
between plants and animals are invented: the water lilies in front are almost as large as the
grey monkey’s head. The same constructed growth appears in Monkeys and Parrot in the Virgin Forest.
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. On this canvas the
method is easiest to read: feathered palms behind, mid-green branches at the centre and bright
green blades at the lower right are separated by hue rather than by lighting. The red shrub at
the left is the only element that breaks that order, which is exactly why it carries so much
weight.
The John Hay Whitney collection
The painting is held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which received it as part
of the collection of John Hay Whitney, the American collector and diplomat. The accession number
is 1982.76.7 and it measures 162.5 x 129.5 cm. American collections discovered Rousseau early,
which explains why so many of his central jungles are now outside France. A related canvas on
our shelf is The Equatorial Jungle.
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.
