Monkeys and Parrot in the Virgin Forest

Henri Rousseau never saw a jungle. He spent his working years as a minor customs official in Paris, taught himself to paint, and built his famous tropical scenes from the hothouse plants and caged animals of the city's botanical garden, the Jardin des Plantes. He made this one around 1905, when he was in his sixties and the young avant-garde, Picasso among them, was just beginning to take the untrained old man seriously. Monkeys peer out from a dense screen of oversized leaves, and a bright parrot sits among them, turned to face straight out as if posing. The strong light falls only across the front of the scene, the way a lantern would if you had stumbled on the clearing at night.