The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope

In the autumn of 1905, this canvas hung in the same room at the Salon d'Automne in Paris as the bright, slashing pictures of Matisse and Derain. A critic named Louis Vauxcelles looked at that room and called it a cage of wild beasts, and the word he used, fauves, stuck to a whole movement. Rousseau was not one of them. He was a retired customs clerk who painted jungles he had never seen, working from the plant houses and the zoo in Paris. His lion sinks its teeth into an antelope while an owl and other creatures watch from the leaves, every frond drawn with the patience of someone copying a houseplant. It was the picture that pulled him back to the jungle scenes he is now known for.