Forêt tropicale avec des singes

Rousseau painted this in 1910, in the last months of his life, and like all his jungles it is pure invention. He never left France. Everything exotic here he assembled at home in Paris: the leaves enlarged from plants in the Jardin des Plantes, the city's botanical garden with its great glass hothouse, and the animals copied from an illustrated book of wild beasts found in his studio after he died. All five monkeys come from photographs in that book. Look at the orange pair swinging on the right. They are gibbons, which have no tails at all, but Rousseau, working from a flat picture and his own idea of what a jungle needed, gave each of them a long curling one.