About this collection
Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) was a Paris customs officer who painted in his free time, never left France, and is now in every museum that can afford him. The jungles he is famous for were assembled from the hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes, an illustrated book of wild animals and the magazines of the day. He was laughed at for twenty years and then taken seriously by the people who mattered next — Picasso, Delaunay, Kandinsky.
We print five of his canvases. Three are jungles, one is a wood outside Paris with a couple kissing in it, and one is the suburb he knew by walking. That last one is here on purpose: hang it beside a jungle and the jungles stop looking naïve. The hand is identical in both — flat layers, no aerial perspective, every leaf and every shutter drawn separately — and it turns out that the man who painted an impossible tiger painted a real lock-gate exactly the same way.
What is here
The Equatorial Jungle, 1909, and Rendezvous in the Forest, 1889, and Tropical Forest with Monkeys, 1910 — all three from the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo, 1908, and Outskirts of Paris, c. 1897–1905 — both from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Every one of them is printed whole: not one of the five needed a crop, because Rousseau painted to all four edges and both museums photographed the canvases edge to edge.
What is not here, and why
The famous ones we do not have are missing for one reason only, and it is not copyright — Rousseau has been in the public domain everywhere we ship since 1981. The Dream and The Sleeping Gypsy are at the Museum of Modern Art, Surprised! at the National Gallery in London, Carnival Evening in Philadelphia, and The Waterfall at the Art Institute of Chicago. None of those museums publishes a file we are allowed to print from commercially. The Metropolitan's Repast of the Lion is free to use but digitised at 3,811 pixels, which carries 32 cm at our 300 dpi floor — not enough for a sheet. We would rather say so than sell you an upscale.
Sizes
The five range from 0.22× the original to 1.11×, and every product page says which. Rousseau's canvases run from 38 cm to 1.9 metres across, so a single house format would have been a lie about four of them. The format follows the source, as everywhere in this shop.