Henri Rousseau - The Merry Jesters Tile

The Merry Jesters (Joyeux farceurs), painted in 1906 in oil on canvas by French Naïve artist Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier, is one of his celebrated imaginary jungle paintings, inhabited by monkeys and a tropical bird. Its comedy is deliberately uneasy: the animals stare outward while an overturned milk bottle and a back-scratcher introduce unexplained, almost pantomime-like props. Rousseau called his late jungle pictures “Mexican landscapes,” although he never visited Mexico; he constructed their exotic flora and fauna from visits to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, children’s books, illustrated magazines and his imagination. Exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1906, The Merry Jesters combines playful absurdity with the dense, mysterious tropical world that made Rousseau famous.