Jungle with Lion

Rousseau never travelled outside France, yet he is remembered for jungles, and he built them out of Paris. On Sundays he walked the hot glasshouses of the Jardin des Plantes, the city's botanical garden, where tropical plants grew under glass, and he studied the animals at its little zoo and in cheap illustrated books. Then he assembled the pieces at home into forests that exist nowhere on earth. This one, from about 1904, is small and almost flat, the leaves stacked in careful overlapping layers with a lion set among them. He once said that walking into those greenhouses full of strange plants felt like stepping into a dream. Every frond is painted with a gardener's patience and given its own clean edge, so the whole dense tangle stays oddly still.