Henri Rousseau – Tropical Landscape: An American Indian Struggling with a Gorilla

Tropical Landscape: An American Indian Struggling with a Gorilla, 1910

A red sun above dense growth

Dark green vegetation fills almost the whole canvas, stacked in layers. High at the centre
hangs the flat red disc of the sun, with a pale greenish-cream sky behind it. Orange
bird-of-paradise flowers are set among the leaves, yellow lotus-shaped blooms sit left of
centre, and pale pink flower spikes hang at the upper left. Across the lower left foreground
lie large blue-green leaves with pronounced veining. Rousseau signed the lower right corner
and added the year.

The struggle in the foreground

Just below centre, among the blades, a man in a feathered headdress and a red and yellow
striped skirt wrestles with a gorilla. He holds a spear that the animal has gripped; both
bodies are placed so that they can be missed entirely until the eye finds the pale skin among
the dark leaves. Rousseau deliberately pushed the scene back into the depth and denied it any
dramatic lighting. A comparable meeting of man and beast is Scouts Attacked by a Tiger.

The last year

The canvas dates from 1910, Rousseau’s final year; he died on 2 September of that year. He
completed several large jungle canvases in those months, although he never saw 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. The same constructed world appears in Negro Attacked by a Jaguar.

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. That is what is
visible here: palm fronds, ferns, the dark canopy and the pale foreground leaves are separated
by a dozen different greens rather than by light and shade. The surface is smooth, the
brushwork barely visible, the leaf edges cut sharp. The same handling is in The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope.

Title and collection

The museum now uses the title Tropical Landscape: An American Indian Struggling with a
Gorilla; an older record speaks of an ape. The painting is held by the Virginia Museum of
Fine Arts in Richmond under object number 84.3, from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul
Mellon. Among the earlier jungles see Tiger in a Tropical Storm.

1910 and the Salon des Independants

In March 1910 Rousseau exhibited The Dream at the Salon des Independants, a large
jungle canvas listed in the exhibition catalogue as number 4468 and accompanied by verses of
his own. The Salon had neither a jury nor prizes: anyone who paid the subscription could show,
and that rule is what allowed a self-taught painter with no academic training to put his work
in front of a wide public year after year. The criticism stayed mocking for a long time, while
in these same years younger painters began to defend him.

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 by this painter is in the Henri Rousseau gallery.