Banana Harvest

Rousseau painted his steaming jungles without ever leaving France. He had never seen the tropics. Instead he wandered the great glass hothouses of the Paris botanical gardens, the Jardin des Plantes, where tropical plants were kept warm and grew huge, and he filled out the rest from illustrated books and the animals at the city zoo. This scene comes from around 1910, the year he died. Two small figures reach up to cut clusters of pale bananas beneath broad, glossy fronds that dwarf them, every leaf drawn with the same crisp, flattened edge.