The Repast of the Lion

Henri Rousseau painted The Repast of the Lion around 1907, when he was 63 years old and still working as a customs clerk in Paris. He had never been to a jungle. He studied the plants in the greenhouses of the Jardin des Plantes and copied the animals from illustrated children's books and popular magazines. The result is a jungle that exists nowhere on earth, painted with the seriousness of a man who believed every leaf. A lion crouches over the body of a dead animal in a clearing surrounded by dense tropical foliage. The vegetation is painted in flat, uniform greens, each leaf outlined in dark green against a lighter green ground. The trees are symmetrical and decorative, more like wallpaper than a forest. The lion is stiff and toylike, its body turned to show its profile, its mouth red with blood. There is no depth in the conventional sense: everything is pressed forward to the surface of the canvas. Rousseau was self-taught, and he painted with a directness that the French art world found either ridiculous or fascinating. He first exhibited at the Salon des Independants in 1886 and continued to show there every year until his death in 1910. The critics mocked him. He was called a Sunday painter, a primitive, a joke. But by 1907, younger artists had started paying attention. Picasso, who owned several Rousseau paintings, threw a famous banquet for him in 1908 in his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir. The avant-garde had decided that Rousseau's innocence was a form of sophistication they could learn from. The Repast of the Lion was probably shown at the Salon d'Automne of 1907. It treats a theme that Rousseau first explored in Surprised! (1891), now in the National Gallery in London, his first jungle painting. He returned to the subject repeatedly in his last years, producing the dense, colorful canvases that became his most recognizable work. Oil on canvas, 113 by 160 centimeters. Rousseau painted with smooth, almost invisible brushwork, building his surfaces in thin layers of flat color. There are no shadows, no atmospheric effects, no traditional modeling. The paint is applied with the patience of a man painting a sign, which is partly what he had done before he became a full-time artist. The horizontal format and dense greens make this print work well in a study, office, or any room with bookshelves. The jungle subject and flat green palette pair with dark wood, leather furniture, and rooms with a lot of plants. The 16x20 or 18x24 size captures the density of the foliage. The painting has a strange, dreamlike quality that rewards long looking. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1951, bequeathed by Sam A. Lewisohn, a lawyer and collector whose bequest brought a number of modern paintings to the museum. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.