Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!), 1891 Henri Rousseau (Le Douanier) (1844-1910)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Henri Rousseau (Le Douanier) also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

Rain comes down in pale, slanting threads, like someone has lightly combed the whole surface with silver-grey. It is a deliciously odd kind of weather: decorative and alarming at once. In the upper right, a thin flash of lightning pricks the sky; below it, the jungle presses forward until there is hardly any breathing space.

Henri Rousseau gives us a tiger crouched low, back arched, muzzle wrinkled, teeth showing. Yet nothing quite settles into a single story. Is this animal startled by the storm, or gathering itself to spring? That uncertainty is the picture’s engine. One might imagine the air thick with wet leaves and hot soil, the hiss of rain filling your ears, and the tiger’s pause becoming almost unbearable.

Look how the place is built: layer after layer of foliage, each leaf described with patient clarity. Greens dominate, but they are not one green. They range from deep bottle tones to sharp yellow-greens, then suddenly there is that flare of russet and red at the right, as if the jungle has bruised. Rousseau’s space stays stubbornly shallow; depth barely opens up. The result feels closer to pattern than to panorama, and that is part of its modernity.

A close, almost intimate detail: the rain’s stripes echo the tiger’s own markings and the long blades of grass, so that nature seems to mimic itself. It is also where Henri Rousseau’s method shows through. He worked section by section, and he likely used a mechanical aid to transfer outlines, which may explain the tiger’s slightly suspended, not-quite-grounded stance. Instead of being a flaw, that hovering quality makes the animal uncanny, like a cut-out dream figure dropped into an overgrown stage set.

This was the first of Rousseau’s jungle scenes, painted without ever leaving France, fed by visits to Paris’s Jardin des Plantes and by images rather than direct experience. You can feel that second-hand exoticism, and also its honesty. In the diagonal rain and the crisp silhouettes, there’s a distant kinship with Hiroshige’s downpours; in the very idea of the tiger, perhaps a memory of Delacroix filtered through prints.

Seen today in the National Gallery London UK england united kingdom, the painting still feels wonderfully unsolved. The tiger is “surprised,” yes. But perhaps it is we who are caught – mid-step – in a jungle that exists purely because someone believed in it hard enough.