Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)

Description

Critics who first saw this canvas at the Salon des Independants in 1891 did not know what to make of it, and audiences have been puzzling over it in much the same way ever since. A tiger in a tropical storm reproduction brings into the home a picture that has unsettled and delighted viewers for well over a century, prized now for the very qualities that once struck Paris as amateur: the flattened space, the decorative density of leaves, the frank, almost childlike confrontation between predator and weather.

About Tiger in a Tropical Storm Reproduction

The painting shows a tiger caught in the instant before it springs, lit by a jagged fork of lightning that tears across a darkened sky. Its prey is never shown; whatever the animal is stalking lies somewhere beyond the right edge of the canvas, so the ambush stays suspended rather than resolved. Grasses and thin branches bend hard against the wind, rendered in silhouette, while Rousseau laid the downpour itself in fine diagonal strokes of silvery grey that cut across the entire composition like a veil drawn over the scene.

Rousseau never travelled beyond France, and he built this jungle from secondhand sources: colonial exhibition displays, illustrated natural history books, and repeated visits to the hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes, where tropical foliage grew under glass in the middle of Paris. He painted the greens in overlapping, carefully distinct layers, each leaf shape given its own outline, until the undergrowth reads as dense without ever losing its individual parts. This was the first of what became a long sequence of jungle paintings, made late in a working life spent mostly as a customs toll collector, and it carries the conviction of someone inventing a visual language with no formal training to fall back on.

The hand-painted reproduction

Each ByMuseum version of this tiger in a tropical storm reproduction is painted by hand in oil on canvas, not printed, by an artist working from the original palette and matching the layered greens, the fractured lightning, and the streaked diagonal rain stroke by stroke. The result is a museum quality reproduction with real surface texture, raised in places where the paint was laid thickly, so the canvas catches light the way an oil painting does rather than lying flat like a printed sheet. Lived with over time, a canvas like this keeps giving up detail: a half-hidden stem, a change in the grey of the rain, the particular angle of one bent reed that was not obvious on first viewing.

• Hand-painted in oil on artist-grade canvas, not a print
• Available in multiple sizes, proportioned to the original composition
• Arrives gallery-ready for hanging
• Includes a certificate of authenticity
• Free worldwide shipping, with no shipping charge to any country