Tiger Hunt

Henri Rousseau never once left France, never saw a jungle or a tiger in the wild. He spent his working life as a clerk collecting tolls at the gates of Paris, painted on Sundays, and for scenes like this hunt he went to what the city could give him, the animals in the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes, the hothouse plants under glass there, and cheap illustrated books and prints of far-off places. Out of those he assembled a hunt no traveller could quite have witnessed, the tiger and its prey locked together in flat, hard-edged foliage. Trained painters laughed at him for years. He kept exhibiting anyway, and by the 1890s younger artists in Paris were beginning to seek him out.