The Repast of the Lion
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
| Location History: | The painting was first owned by Wilhelm Uhde in Paris, who bought it directly from Rousseau himself by July 1910 for 200 francs. He then sold it to Julius Keller, who had it in Aachen, Germany, by 1914. From there, it passed through the New York dealer Stephan Bourgeois around 1923. That same year, it was acquired by Adolph Lewisohn in New York, who owned it until his death in 1938. After Adolph’s death, it went to his son, Sam A. Lewisohn, who kept it until his own death in 1951 at which point it was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum. |
Rousseau turns predation into a strangely ceremonial scene: the lion feeds quietly within a jungle whose overwhelming density makes the landscape feel enclosed and almost theatrical. The sharply articulated foliage creates a tension between close observation and fantasy, while the flattened spatial construction denies the viewer a conventional sense of depth. Nature consequently appears both luxuriant and claustrophobic; it's surreal, but governed by concealment, appetite, and violence. The contrast between the tranquil visual surface and the animal’s act of feeding gives the scene its unsettling stillness, suggesting not an observed wilderness but an imagined, self-contained world where beauty and brutality coexist.