A NEW REALITY – growing up with Henri Rousseau – Dianne Hofmeyr

The second of September seems auspicious to me. I love the rhythmic quality of the two ‘ssss’ sounds and growing up in a southern hemisphere, the date was also the harbinger of summer.

The second of September happens also to be the anniversary of the death of Henri Rousseau. As a child his flat, saturated, naïve jungle scenes where tigers peep through monstrous leaves and panthers prowl and a woman lies dreaming as a lion silently sniffs her body, watched only by the moon… the moon and me!... were a source of immense fascination.

The fact that it was all slightly improbable, only added to the mystery. In The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope, the lion snaps through the backbone of an antelope while a panther waits and birds of prey already have ribbons of red flesh trailing from their beaks... even though the lion has not yet killed the antelope. As an imaginative child I could smell the jungle, sense the heat and hear the crunching.

The scenes filled me with a sense of foreboding and a deep frisson of fear… the same I felt when I knew the bears would come back and find Goldilocks sleeping in their house. His paintings were terrifying fairytales told in colour instead of print where the familiar becomes strange, and the strange, familiar.

Why was the The lovely snake (painted from a story about the painter Delaunay’s mother on a trip to India) called lovely... when it gave me such shudders? Is the woman playing the flute in the middle of this lush landscape with snakes sinuously surrounding her, trying to hypnotize them? Is she Eve in the Garden of Eden?

Like a writer drawing images from the subconscious to reflect a new world, Rousseau creates a new visual reality. But his figures and his animals are far removed from everyday life, his Botany and Biology skewed, his images conjured up from his imagination and visits to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and paging through journals for inspiration. Some of his early works like the hatchet-faced woman with hands twice the size of the little cat cowering in the corner, and the monstrous child dangling its father, like a string puppet, have a sinister almost Paula Rego-like quality.

Sleeping Gypsy with it's huge-maned lion, the mane blowing in what we can only imagine a hot desert wind, sniffing the body of a sleeping mandolin player in bright moonlight, crept into one of my children’s novels. When Oliver finds himself alone in the Okavango Swamps in Oliver Strange and the Journey to the Swamps, he recalls the silent fear this painting held for him (and me).

  

Rousseau's Surprised! or  Tiger in Tropical Storm, which hangs in the National Gallery, is the inspiration for my new picture book TIGER WALK, illustrated by Jesse Hodgson. It's out in October, published by Otterbarry Books.

That same moon silently observes the stealth of the tiger as it steps out from the painting with green jewel-eyes and swishing tail. I wrote this story for the child I used to be… and the child I still am! The eerie jungle scenes that fascinated me with that all-pervading: don't go into that forest, my darling, there's a monster waiting to gobble you up!... still do.

NOTE: There are less than 3900 wild tigers left in the world. In years to come tigers might only exist in stories.
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