The Equatorial Jungle, 1909

The print

Printed by theprintspace, the East London fine-art lab trusted by artists, galleries and museums. Each print is made to order on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, a heavyweight 308gsm paper made from 100% cotton, with a soft matte surface and a natural white tone, using archival pigment inks made to last for generations.

Photo Rag suits this painting especially well. Its matte cotton surface keeps the deep, layered greens of this almost wall-to-wall foliage rich and velvety, with no shine to break up the leaves.

Sizes available:

50×50cm, 20×20″, fine art print, open edition
70×70cm, 28×28″, fine art print, open edition

Safe, tracked delivery guaranteed worldwide, with sustainable packaging.

The story

By 1909 the jungle had become Rousseau’s signature. He was in his sixties, long retired from the Paris customs office, and he still had never left France. His jungles came from the hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes, from illustrated books and from an album of wild animals published by the Galeries Lafayette department store, which he kept in his studio.

Here the forest is almost all there is. Leaves fill the tall canvas from edge to edge, and only slowly do you notice two animals in golden, brown and black fur peering out from among them.

The painting passed from the artist to Robert Delaunay, then through Paris dealers to the American collector Chester Dale in 1928. Dale left it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1963.