Monkeys and Parrot in the Virgin Forest (Singes et perroquet dans la forêt vierge)

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FROM THE BARNES FOUNDATION’S CATALOG

Henri Rousseau worked as a Paris tax collector, teaching himself to paint in his spare hours. Though he never traveled to an actual jungle, he regularly visited the Jardin des Plantes, Paris's museum of natural history, which included an aviary of exotic birds and a monkey house. With the foreground lit brightly, as if by the lantern of a visitor who has just happened upon the scene, the animals peer out from a shadowy web of oversized tropical plants. And in the last hours of the tropical night, the deep red sun looms in the sky.

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