Description
| Year of creation: | 1905 |
| Original size: | 80.7 cm x 99.9 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania, USA |
Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest, 1905
Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest is one of the Rousseau canvases in which the jungle is not a hunting ground but a quiet setting for a single human figure. The 1905 work belongs to the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania and measures 80.7 x 99.9 cm.
A figure set among leaves
A woman in a long dress stands, or walks slowly, between the trunks, surrounded by leaves larger than she is. Rousseau inverted the proportions deliberately: the plants come forward and dominate by size while the person stays small and quiet. That inversion is what separates his forests from classical landscape, in which the human figure is the measure of space. The scene has no event, no attack and no narrative, which is why part of the literature reads it as an image of memory rather than a view of a place. A related figure, this time with a beast, appears in Negro Attacked by a Jaguar. The canvas is now part of Albert C. Barnes’s collection, assembled on a large scale in the decades after Rousseau’s death and hung in his house in dense wall ensembles, works placed side by side rather than singly. It is in exactly that neighbourhood that Rousseau’s construction of space shows how far it stands from the Impressionists hanging beside him.
How this landscape was made
Rousseau studied plants in the Paris hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes and copied leaf shapes from botanical books and illustrated magazines. He then arranged them in layers, one behind another, with no aerial perspective and no softening of outlines in the distance. The result is a forest that reads as exact and impossible at once. The same procedure at larger scale is visible in The Merry Jesters.
The hand-painted reproduction
Production starts only once you order: onto gallery canvas, in the size you choose. The painter works from the original, so the relation between figure and foliage holds at smaller formats too. The canvas arrives stretched on a wooden stretcher frame and ready to hang, without an added frame. The full range is in the Henri Rousseau gallery, and a related jungle scene is The Dream. A figure in a wood that is a setting rather than a hunting ground appears in Rendezvous in the Forest.
- Motif: a female figure among the large leaves of a tropical forest
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted
- Sizes: from 50 x 60 cm to 160 x 200 cm
- Point of interest: the scale is inverted, the plants larger than the person, and in Rousseau that is deliberate
