Room 45

Find the tiger among the rain and dense leaves in Rousseau’s Surprised! The plants create an enveloping setting, assembled by an artist whose jungle pictures grew from imagination and study rather than travel to a tropical forest. Around 1900, artists in Paris and other cities were rethinking how paintings could represent the world. The room brings together very different responses, from Rousseau’s foliage to Cézanne’s still lifes and George Bellows’s Men of the Docks. Choose two pictures with contrasting surfaces. Notice how each artist makes a foreground, and how easily or awkwardly your eye can move into the space behind it.