Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)

Henri Rousseau’s first jungle painting shows a tiger, eyes bright, crouching in the undergrowth as a violent storm breaks around it. Lightning splits a sky of layered greens and grays while the jungle’s leaves bend and thrash in the wind. Though Rousseau never left France, his invented jungles, built from botanical specimens seen in the Paris greenhouses, have a hallucinatory clarity that made him a hero to the avant-garde.