Frizz

the Henri Rousseau exhibition at Tate Modern, wonderfully curated it includes a room where you can watch old films of Paris, see photographs and pictures from the world exhibition for which the Eiffel Tower was built, really informative it puts his work into the context of the time. Amazingly, he was completely self taught, even though he painted jungle scenes he never travelled outside of France, instead he got his inspiration from the stuffed animals at the Natural History Museum and the exotic plants at the Botanical Gardens. So, very much the Victorian and bearing that in mind, he would never have seen the animals he painted in motion, experienced their gracefulness and perhaps that explains their two dimensional quality in his paintings. Go see… it's on until the 5th Feb. Thank you Amos for telling me about it.