Henri Rousseau – The Equatorial Jungle, 1909 | Giclée Print

A wall of leaves, painted leaf by leaf. Two small apes look out from the middle of it and a third hangs above; three pink blossoms and one white spike are the only breaks in the green. Measured pixel by pixel this is the greenest sheet in the shop — ninety-five per cent of the canvas carries colour, and nine tenths of that colour is green.

Rousseau never saw a jungle. He was a Paris customs officer who painted in his spare time and did not leave France. The plants come from the hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes, from illustrated magazines and from a picture book of exotic animals; the scale is invented, the botany is impossible, and the light belongs to no continent. He was mocked for it in his lifetime and then taken seriously by the people who mattered next — this canvas went from the artist straight to Robert Delaunay.

Why it works as a wall. There is no horizon, no vanishing point and no single subject. The picture is built in flat layers, the way a stage set is, and it reads at any distance: from across the room it is a green field, up close it is several hundred individually drawn leaves. That combination is rare, and it is why the picture holds a large sheet.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the National Gallery of Art's own open-access photograph of the canvas. It is not a twentieth-century painting and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 129.5 × 140.6 cm / 51 × 55.4 in — oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington
50 × 50 cm / 19.7 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.30× original. Image 38.57 × 42.00 cm.
70 × 70 cm / 27.6 × 27.6 in — reduced, 0.42× original. Image 54.00 × 58.80 cm.

On the file. Washington's photograph of this canvas runs 23,548 × 25,646 pixels — the largest source in the catalogue by a wide margin. At our 300 dpi floor it would carry a print two metres wide. The sheet is the limit here, not the picture: on the 70 × 70 the print still has more than a thousand dots per inch available to it, and we use three hundred of them.

Provenance
Henri Rousseau (French, 1844–1910), The Equatorial Jungle, 1909. Signed lower right: Henri Julien Rousseau / 1909.
Oil on canvas; 140.6 × 129.5 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Chester Dale Collection, acc. no. 1963.10.213.
From the artist to Robert Delaunay, Paris; Ambroise Vollard, Paris; sold 1925 to Juliana Force, returned to Vollard the same year; Galerie Étienne Bignou, Paris; sold 1928 to Chester Dale, New York; bequest to the National Gallery in 1963.
Public domain. The museum publishes its photograph under its Open Access policy.

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.