The Repast of the Lion

Henri Rousseau never saw a jungle. He spent his working life as a Paris toll collector, which earned him the nickname le Douanier, the customs man, and he built his tropical scenes from the glasshouses of the city's botanical garden and pictures torn from magazines and children's books. He painted this lion crouched over its kill in 1907 and showed it that autumn at the Salon d'Automne. By then the young painters around Picasso had begun to notice him, half in mockery and half in earnest, and a year later they threw him a famous banquet. Look closely at the leaves and you see plants stacked flat, edge to edge, more like pressed specimens than a real thicket. Rousseau died three years after finishing it.