Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)

How the rain got onto the canvas

There are no raindrops in the picture. Rousseau finished the jungle and the tiger first, then covered the entire painted surface with a mesh of diagonal, semi-transparent silver-grey stripes to stand for tropical rain. The National Gallery notes that those stripes echo the tiger's own stripes and the long blades of the leaves, so the weather and the animal are drawn in the same marks. Tate, which borrowed the painting in 2005, describes the same effect as a white and grey glazing laid over the whole surface.

The National Gallery links the method to Japanese woodblock prints. It names one in particular: Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake, which Utagawa Hiroshige published in 1857. The Gallery also records two working habits behind the picture. Rousseau completed the canvas section by section rather than all at once. He used a pantograph, a mechanical enlarger that let him trace the outline of a projected image straight onto the canvas.

The canvas was reworked. Above the tall grasses on the right there are darkened patches that the National Gallery suggests are the remains of prey Rousseau later painted out.

The first critic to take him seriously

The Salon des Indépendants had no jury and gave no prizes, which is why an unschooled customs clerk could hang there at all. Rousseau showed the painting at the 1891 Salon as Surpris!, and it drew the first serious critical notice of his career. The notice came from Félix Vallotton, a Swiss painter and printmaker then twenty-five years old, writing in the Gazette de Lausanne on 25 March 1891.

Vallotton reported that crowds gathered in front of Rousseau's entries and laughed at them, and that the picture flattened everything hung near it. Then he made the judgment that has followed the painting ever since.

“His tiger surprising a prey is worth seeing; it is the alpha or the omega of painting, and so disconcerting that the most deeply rooted convictions pull up short and hesitate before so much self-assurance and so much childlike naiveté.”

Vallotton closed by saying he had a sincere esteem for such efforts and preferred them a hundred times over to the deplorable mistakes hanging nearby. His phrase for the tiger is worth reading exactly: the French is l'alpha ou l'oméga de la peinture, the beginning or the end of painting, and he does not say which. The National Gallery's own page attributes the review to a Swiss journal without naming it; the Fondation Félix Vallotton, which published his collected criticism in 2012, places it in the Gazette de Lausanne on that date.

Vallotton also describes the tiger as surprising a prey, in a review written when the paint was months old. That is evidence for the animal the National Gallery believes was painted out of the right-hand grasses.

A jungle assembled in Paris

Rousseau told people he had seen tropical forests while serving with a French expeditionary force in Mexico in the early 1860s. The National Gallery states plainly that the claim had no basis: he spent four years in the army from 1863 and never left France. Guillaume Apollinaire repeated the Mexico story, and Tate records that Rousseau eventually admitted he had traveled no further than the glass houses of the Jardin des Plantes.

That is where the plants come from. The Jardin des Plantes was free to enter and Rousseau went often. Its collection mixed ordinary house plants with tropical species, which is why the foliage here shifts between the two without apology. The gardens were run by the natural history museum. Its Zoology Galleries had opened for the 1889 Paris World Fair with a large display of stuffed animals posed as though alive. The same grounds held a run-down zoo that kept lions, tigers and jaguars.

The tiger itself is a composite, in the National Gallery's account, of stuffed specimens, zoological and magazine illustrations, and the domestic cat. The Gallery adds that Rousseau may also have known tigers painted by Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Tate goes further and names a Delacroix pastel of a tiger fighting a lion as the direct source, which is a firmer claim than the Gallery is willing to make.

Lost for a generation, then bought for London

The painting disappeared from view after Rousseau died in 1910. The National Gallery's provenance note, citing the researcher Henry Certigny, says it was not found again until around 1925, by which time it was going under the title Orage dans la Forêt, Storm in the Forest. Rousseau had listed it in a memorandum of his own career dated 10 July 1895 under yet another title, Tigre poursuivant des Explorateurs, a tiger chasing explorers.

It surfaced at the Marie Harriman Gallery in New York in the winter of 1931. Georges Bernheim lent it to the Kunsthalle Basel in 1933 under the title Paysage exotique. In 1934 Henry Clifford of Radnor, near Philadelphia, bought it through the Valentine Gallery. The National Gallery bought it from Clifford in 1972 with the aid of a substantial donation from Walter H. Annenberg, and it became NG6421.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Rousseau painted the rain last, as a mesh of diagonal silver-grey stripes laid over the finished picture, so every close view here carries it. Start with the tiger, then work out to the weather, the plants and the signature.

Detail views use the same reproduction throughout. National Gallery catalogue entry for Surprised! (NG6421).