Tropical Landscape: American Indian Struggling with a Gorilla

Rousseau painted this jungle in 1910, the last year of his life, and he built it without ever leaving France. A retired Paris toll clerk who taught himself to paint, he assembled his tropics from the hothouses of the city's botanical garden and the animals of its zoo, then enlarged the leaves until a man and a gorilla are nearly swallowed by them. The struggle at the centre plays out under a low red sun, small against all that foliage. Critics still treated him as a naive amateur, even as younger painters like Picasso had begun to seek him out. He died that September, a few months after finishing scenes like this one.