Scouts Attacked by a Tiger (Éclaireurs attaqués par un tigre) - Henri Rousseau (1904)

a Tiger

Oil on canvas

State Hermitage Museum

Scouts Attacked by a Tiger (Éclaireurs attaqués par un tigre) is a 1904 oil on canvas by the French self-taught master Henri Rousseau, depicting two uniformed scouts set upon by a tiger within a densely layered, luminous jungle. One figure is thrown from his rearing horse while the other has already fallen, the composition dramatizing the violent collision between human civilization and untamed nature. Rousseau, who never traveled outside France, constructed his jungle imagery from visits to the Jardin des Plantes and Paris's natural history museums, famously employing over fifty shades of green to render his foliage. Painted at the height of the colonial era, the work belongs to the celebrated series of jungle paintings that secured Rousseau's reputation among avant-garde contemporaries including Picasso and Matisse.