On The Hungry Lion Attacking an Antelope

The environment is like the unconscious. It would be preferred by some to remain in the background. Foregrounding it is like the return of a repressed sense of its agency. Henri Rousseau’s work is very much about the agency of the plant. His module, like Piet Mondrian’s grid, is the leaf. While never having visited a tropical region and instead using the natural history museum as a guide, the vast majority of Rousseau’s popular work depicts jungles scenes. Each containing a large variety of plants with a limited amount of non-human animals. As a result, there is a symbiosis in his work between figure and ground, or animal and plant, which recalls an ecological view of survival in the world relating to the survival of an organism’s environment. The image of the Lion eating an antelope has a curious creature in the left had corner. Is this the agency of the ecosystem returning?

The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope (Le lion ayant faim se jette sur l'antilope) is a large oil-on-canvas painting created by Henri Rousseau in 1905.