Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest (Femme se promenant dans une forêt exotique)

Henri Rousseau

Oil on canvas

Barnes Foundation

In this oil painting of 1905, a fashionably dressed woman stands within a dense, stage-like jungle, dwarfed by oversize plants, fantastical purple flowers, and orange trees bearing fruit far larger than her own head. Wearing a long dress and hat more suited to a Parisian park than a tropical wilderness, she gazes outward with an expression of vague surprise, recalling the startled animals that populate Rousseau's other jungle canvases. Rousseau, a largely self-taught French Post-Impressionist known as "Le Douanier," constructed his imaginary jungles not from firsthand experience but from visits to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, illustrated books, and his own vivid imagination, never having left France. The painting's flat forms, sharply outlined leaves, and unsettling sense of scale are hallmarks of the Naïve art tradition, and the work is now held in the permanent collection of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.