Jaguar Attacking a Horse

Rousseau finished this in 1910, the last year of his life. Like all his jungles, it was made without his ever having seen one. He never left France. Instead he wandered the hothouses and the zoo of the Paris botanical gardens, sketching palms and big cats, and filled in the rest from illustrated books and his own imagination. Here a jaguar has brought down a horse in a wall of dense green leaves that press in from every side. He builds the foliage leaf by flat leaf, each one outlined, so the whole thing feels both still and suffocating. The struggle at the centre is half-swallowed by the plants around it.