Henri Rousseau, 'Surprised!', 1891

Transcript

This is a detailed visual description of the painting ‘Surprised!’ by the French artist Henri Rousseau. It will take about 8 minutes to listen to and includes information about the scene depicted and the collage of ideas and resources that the artist used to create it.

This large rectangular painting is 162 cm wide by 130 cm tall, about a foot shorter than a standard single bed. It is a brightly coloured fantasy scene of a tiger in a stormy jungle, painted on canvas, using oil paints.

At the bottom left of the painting a bold black signature in a flowing calligraphic text reads ‘Henri Rousseau’. Underneath he has added the date, 1891.

This picture was the first of around 20 ‘jungle’ paintings that Rousseau produced during his career. He began painting quite late in life, taking seriously to it after retirement from his job as an office clerk at the Paris Octroi. His work attracted a small group of admirers, including Picasso and the poet Apollinaire. But many artists, tutored into snobbish, narrow-minded opinions of ‘acceptable’ art, ridiculed what they regarded as Rousseau’s eccentric, unrefined and simplistic painting style. Such work by non-academically trained artists is sometimes referred to as Naïve art.

The forest Rousseau depicts is not photographically realistic. With no formal training in 3D tonal modelling, or in creating mathematical perspective, the sense of space in this painting is flatter and feels more akin to a collage. This adds to the jungle atmosphere as we cannot see a clear path into, or through, the decoratively layered foliage.
The plants are heavily stylised – their forms simplified with clear outlines. The tangle of tall grasses and trees that overlap and intertwine form a richly patterned surface in every imaginable hue of green, here and there punctuated with foliage rendered in a bright contrasting red and russet brown colour.

The tiger, with arched back and bared teeth, crouches low in thick jungle foliage. Wild, bulging yellow eyes and static whiskers give him a cartoon-like appearance. We notice too that the tiger’s passage through the forest is impossible – floating amid the grasses, it seems to balance its great weight on their sinuous stalks, rather than walking with its paws on the ground.

Separating the painting into thirds, the top third, furthest in the distance, is filled with a slate-grey stormy sky punctuated with white zigzag lightning bolts. Two crack diagonally down from left to right in the top-right quarter of the picture. We can just make out a third lightning bolt in the top left-hand corner.

We may not notice these at first, as they are obscured by the criss-crossed boughs of several trees which bend and sway in the storm winds. One dark weeping-fig tree stands more prominent than the rest. Its strong, moss-green trunk rises from behind grasses on the left hand of the picture. Its main trunk splits into two - forming a letter ‘Y’ shape. One large bough branches out to the right of its trunk, forming a rainbow-like arch of branches stretching across the sky. Spindly twigs at the end hold onto a few sprigs of foliage, clustered in groups of four or five almond-shaped leaves.
The middle third of the painting is formed of dense and varied ‘tropical’ plants. These also bend to the will of the storm which blows in from the left side of the picture. From left to right two tall beige feathery pampas grasses stand in front of the weeping-fig trunk. They are situated to the left and just behind of the tiger. Their feathery fronds blow to the right echoing the rainbow shape of the branches in the sky.

To their right a patch of spiky grasses, perhaps a fan palm, splay out behind the tigers back and face. Their green, stripy blades contrast with the tiger’s russet and gold fur striped with black. Their fan shape echoes the tigers splayed paw which creeps out, gingerly below the tiger’s chin. Next a patch of less distinct tree trunks forms a series of vertical stripes in a selection of russet and brown colours and to the far right of this a vivid scarlet swamp cypress gives the painting an exciting blast of colour.

At the bottom third of the painting a swathe of tall wavy snake-like grasses run along the foreground, closest to us. Rousseau most likely took inspiration from either agave plants or snake plants - also known as Saint George’s sword, they taper to a pointed top. Closely butted together in bright shades of olive and lime greens they begin nearly halfway up the left-hand edge of the painting and gently drop to a foot high at its centre. Three leafy stems reach up along with the snake grasses in the foreground. Rousseau uses the contrasting russet colour to pick out their individual leaves running rhythmically along each side of their stems, in a ladder-like fashion, perpendicular to the stripy grasses.

Lurking amongst these grasses, sandwiched between the snake plants and the fan palm behind, we encounter one of the most charismatic and memorable tigers ever painted. Posed in a crouching position its haunches stick up and out from the grass - its back leg folded up in a zigzag full of potential energy, ready to pounce. Its black and orange sinuous tail snakes through the pampas grass behind it. Bright red rubbery lips frame a row of bright white triangular teeth. Its wrinkled nose is framed by fantastically odd whiskers which bristle diagonally upwards, giving it the impression of having received an electric shock!

Is the tiger about to ‘surprise’ its prey? Or is the tiger in the moment surprised by the lightening and the loud thunderclap that we imagine emanating from it? The ambiguity adds an element of mystery to the painting, which may well have been Rousseau’s intention.

Rousseau reworked the canvas, and the darkened areas just above the tall grasses on the right may be traces of prey that was subsequently removed. Several contemporary reviews of the painting mention prey being hunted, and Rousseau himself later referred to the picture as A Tiger Chasing Explorers.
A large dark green rubber plant at the bottom right of the painting would provide excellent cover for any prey. The horizontal patterns of veins are picked out on each of its 7 tear-drop shaped leaves. But these plants were not observed by Rousseau in any jungle.

These pictures gave an aura of exoticism to both Rousseau and his art in his lifetime. He claimed that he had served with a French expeditionary force in Mexico in the early 1860s. He did spend four years in the army from 1863, but he never visited the jungle. In fact, he never left France. Rousseau’s jungles are entirely imaginary. A collage of many experiences and images all found within reach of Paris.
The plants, painted in precise detail, are a mixture of domestic house plants and tropical varieties, which he had seen at the Jardin des Plantes, the Botanical Gardens in Paris.

The tiger itself is a composite of observations of zoological specimens, magazine illustrations and the domestic cat. Run by the Natural History Museum, the Gardens included a dilapidated zoo (that nonetheless housed lions, tigers, and jaguars) and new Zoology Galleries which held a large collection of stuffed animals in ‘lifelike’ poses. Entry to the Botanical Gardens was free, and Rousseau was a frequent visitor. Rousseau may also have seen images of tigers by Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme, which were often reproduced in prints and photographs.

Rousseau also used a Pantograph - a mechanical enlarger that looks akin to a piece of trellis, or the mechanism used to extend a comedy boxing glove. This pantograph device enabled him to trace the outlines of a projected image directly onto the canvas. This may explain why the tiger appears awkwardly suspended in space rather than being firmly placed on the ground.

The composition of this painting is more complex than many of Rousseau’s previous efforts. It is one of his most meticulously worked pictures, worked by completing sections of the canvas in sequence.

Once the jungle and tiger were completed Rousseau covered the entire picture surface with a mesh of diagonal semi-transparent silver-grey stripes, representing tropical rain. echoing the tiger’s stripes and the long blades of grass.

Surprised! was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants of 1891. Established in Paris in 1884 under the slogan, ‘without jury nor reward’, the Salon des Indépendants was a response to the narrow traditionalism of the official, government-sponsored Salon and it enabled more diverse styles of painting to be exhibited to the public. Rousseau would be a regular exhibitor at its annual show.

Towards the end of Rousseau’s life terms like ‘primitive’ and ‘naïve’ took on a different tone, as formally learned techniques for producing photographic-like ‘realism’ were no longer the limited measure of value in art.

Rousseau’s later jungle paintings drew considerable attention - admired for their invention, formal power and colour. His paintings, once ridiculed as works of crude technique made by a man who ‘paints with his feet with his eyes closed’, are now cherished for their authenticity of expression.