異国の森を歩く女性

Rousseau painted this in 1905, the same autumn that the Salon d'Automne in Paris erupted over Matisse and his friends, whose wild colour earned them the nickname the wild beasts. Rousseau was showing his own jungles in that charged season, having come back to the subject after some 13 years away from it. This one keeps his oddest trick. A woman in respectable city dress walks into a forest that dwarfs her, the leaves enormous, the flowers a strange purple, and oranges hanging overhead nearly twice the size of her head. Every blade and leaf is drawn with the same fixed, careful edge, so the scene feels less like a place than a vivid dream held perfectly still. She strolls through it as calmly as down a boulevard.