Henri Rousseau – Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo, 1908 | Giclée Print

A tiger has a buffalo by the throat in the middle of a jungle that never existed. Around them: banana clusters hanging like lanterns, orange fruit, a fan of blades, and a wall of green built leaf by leaf up to a strip of pale sky. The two animals are almost the smallest thing in the picture.

Rousseau never saw a jungle. He was a Paris customs officer who painted in his free time and never left France. The plants come from the hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes, the animals from an illustrated picture book of wild beasts; the scale is impossible, the botany invented, the light of no particular continent. This is one of the late jungles — 1908, two years before his death — from the run of pictures that had been laughed at for twenty years and were about to be taken seriously by Picasso, Delaunay and everyone after them.

Why it works as a wall. There is no horizon and no vanishing point. The picture is built in flat layers, like a stage set, so it reads at any distance: from across the room a dark green field with one orange accident in it; up close several hundred individually drawn leaves and a tiger with yellow eyes. Ninety-nine per cent of the canvas carries colour and seven eighths of that colour is green — the second greenest sheet in this shop, after Rousseau’s own Equatorial Jungle.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s own open-access photograph of the canvas. It is not a painting and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 170 × 189.5 cm — oil on fabric, Cleveland Museum of Art
50 × 50 cm / 19.7 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.22× original. Image 42.00 × 37.63 cm.
70 × 70 cm / 27.6 × 27.6 in — reduced, 0.31× original. Image 58.80 × 52.68 cm.

No crop. Rousseau painted to all four edges and the museum photographed the canvas edge to edge. We scanned every column of the top and bottom edges and every row of the sides for a rim of bare canvas: the median is three to five pixels, the worst run half a millimetre on the left. There is no studio backdrop anywhere at the margin. So the file is printed whole; nothing has been trimmed and nothing added.

On the borders. The canvas is almost square — 1.116 wide to tall — so on both sheets the width binds at the house 84 %: 4.00 cm at the sides on the small sheet and 5.60 on the large one, with the deeper margins above and below (5.75 and 6.62, then 8.05 and 9.26). Both sit at optical centre, 1:1.15, not in the middle.

Resolution. Cleveland scans its paintings as uncompressed TIFF; this one is 12,503 × 11,202 pixels and 420 megabytes. That is 756 dpi at the small size and 540 at the large one, against our flat 300 dpi — the most matte fine art paper resolves. At that floor the file would carry an image 106 cm wide. The sheet is the limit here, not the picture.

Provenance
Henri Rousseau (French, 1844–1910), Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo, 1908. Signed lower right.
Oil on fabric, 170 × 189.5 cm.
Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund, acc. no. 1949.186.
Public domain. The museum publishes its photograph under Creative Commons Zero.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The colour of the museum’s file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger — how the file, not the sheet, sets the ceiling.