Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo (1908): Art, History and Details

Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo (1908) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Henri Rousseau (French, 1844–1910).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Having never ventured outside France, Henri Rousseau derived his jungle scenes from reading travel books and visiting the Paris botanical garden. He placed this imaginary scene of a tiger attacking a buffalo within a fantastic jungle environment in which botanical accuracy was of little importance (note the bananas growing upside down). Here, sharply outlined hothouse plants are enlarged to fearsome proportions. Rousseau was working on this painting while imprisoned for fraud in December 1907. Officials granted him an early release to finish it for exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants, where this major composition, one of the artist's largest and most important, appeared in March 1908. A self-taught artist and retired customs inspector, Rousseau was admired by Pablo Picasso and other avant-garde artists for his originality and the naïve purity of his vision.

Object facts

• Title: Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo
• Date: 1908
• Creator attribution: Henri Rousseau (French, 1844–1910)
• Culture: France, late 19th-early 20th Century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 183 x 203 x 4.5 cm (72 1/16 x 79 15/16 x 1 3/4 in.); Unframed: 170 x 189.5 cm (66 15/16 x 74 5/8 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1949.186

A detail from the museum

Many of Henri Rousseau's paintings depict wild animals and tropical jungles that might lead one to believe he traveled widely. However, Rousseau never left France, but drew inspiration from visiting botanical gardens and reading travel books.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Le douanier Rousseau: l'innocence archaïque [exposition au Musée d'Orsay, du 22 mars au 17 juillet 2016]. Dossier De L'art (Dijon). Dijon: Édition Faton, 2016. catalogue number 89
• Fajt, Jiří. Celnik Douanier Rousseau: Painter's Paradise Lost : [Exposition National Gallery, Prague, 15.09.2016-15.01.2017]. Prague: National Gallery, 2016.
• Francis, Henry. "'The Jungle' by Henri-Julien Rousseau." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 36, no. 9 (November 1949): 170-178.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.