Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo

Rousseau never left France. He imagined tropical scenes from travel books and plants in Paris's botanical garden. He prepared this large canvas for the 1908 Salon des Indépendants. Shortly before the exhibition he was imprisoned for fraud, then released early so that he could finish the work.

A striped tiger bends toward the buffalo. The action sits low among plants that rival the animals in scale.

The buffalo's gray body occupies the lower center. Its broad mass differs from the more flexible silhouette of the attacking tiger.

Huge leaves overlap one another. Rousseau enlarged familiar hothouse plants to create the imagined density of a jungle.

Pale flower forms hang among the foliage. The painter assembled plants freely rather than reconstructing a botanically exact plant community.

A pale moon appears above the vegetation. A small opening of sky completes the space over an almost continuous wall of leaves.

Rousseau was largely self-taught and worked in the Paris customs service. He exhibited regularly with the Indépendants from 1886. Younger artists supported him, and Picasso held a banquet in his honor in the year this painting appeared.