Rousseau Jungle Paintings

Tropical Forest with Monkeys by Henri Rousseau

The second grade students created these vibrant works after exploring jungle paintings by French Post-Impressionist Henri Rousseau. Rousseau was considered a naïve painter, as he commenced his career as a self-taught artist much later in his life, having absolutely no formal training. Not only that, but he devoted his subjects primarily to jungles even though he had never seen one in real life. In fact, it is widely believed he never traveled outside of France! Instead he was inspired by visits to botanical gardens and zoos, in addition to relying on his wandering imagination while reading books about foreign, tropical places.

The second graders used their imagination and images of plants and animals for reference as they created depth in their drawings, showing a foreground, middle ground and background. After tracing their drawings on clear mylar, they took an interesting approach to painting, when they began applying acrylics in reverse on the back of their mylar. This allowed them to place more emphasis the planning aspect of their artistic approach. In addition to this new style of painting, they were challenged to hand mix every color that hit their surface using just the primary colors RED, YELLOW and BLUE and black and white, resulting in an array of brilliant, original palettes!