 My name is Nancy Ison, I'm the Guns Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation and you're joining me in my home this morning but really I'd like to be taking you on a visit to the Barnes Foundation and I'd like us to head up to Gallery 14 which is on the second floor of the gallery and it's just a wonderful space, it's a little more intimate than the main floor, the ceilings are lower and you see this wonderful horizontal arrangement that I found at Dr Barnes created. Now the work that I'd like us to focus on is at the centre of the wall and you can see in this arrangement how the composition itself really helps to focus our eye, despite everything that's going on around it, the decorative arts, the paintings, the metalwork, we can't help but be attracted to this really beguiling jungle scene that just captures our attention so strongly and let's leap in. So here we have it, it's called Scouts Attack by a Tiger and it was made by the French artist Henri Rousseau in 1904. Now Rousseau was born in 1844 so as you can tell from doing the math he was a mature artist by this stage and we know that he made it in 1904 because that is the very same year that he writes to the Secretary for Fine Arts of the French state and he asks him to buy it so Rousseau certainly doesn't lack confidence. And it's a really wonderful scene, I mentioned that composition and let's just take a moment to appreciate it. If we start in the background we have this wonderful silhouette of foliage, these wonderful spidery leaves that just cast their shadow or their silhouette against the sky and that sky seems to be made of a sort of very pale blue mixed with a lot of white so that contrast is very very sharp. We can also see as we get to the front of the work how Rousseau frames the piece in this bright green foliage in its foreground and that green runs through many variants of colour so let's just go into the corner here you can see it runs from the deepest green to a green with touches of brown touches of white really seeming to enjoy the piecing together there and we know from seeing photographs of Rousseau's works when they were incomplete that he tended to paint his pictures in stages so rather than work across the canvas all at once he would paint in a way that's a little bit how we used to paint by numbers you know piece by piece working across the canvas and I suspect that's how he made these green areas. But what does all of this do? It essentially pulls our attention back to the action in the scene and the action is pretty gruesome we have two figures in white one of whom is on horseback being attacked by a huge tiger and that tiger is really ferocious it has a glowing yellow eye it has its claws barred it has its teeth just you know all shown there it's in full attack mode already we can see that the tiger has taken a section out of the stomach of one of these these scouts so really we can see this is a moment of crisis now where on earth would Rousseau have got the idea of making a work like this now for many people that knew the artist in his lifetime they assumed that this was something that had been inspired by Rousseau's trip to Mexico the only problem was that Rousseau never been to Mexico this misunderstanding came about because in the 1800s France had been involved in a very ill-fated military campaign in Mexico and people who knew Rousseau assumed that because he was a soldier at one point that he had been part of an expedition to Mexico and that perhaps he had seen jungle foliage at first hand but Rousseau was quite upfront about the fact that his inspiration for his jungles had come instead from what he saw in Paris he would go to the botanical gardens there and he would go to the hot houses and he would see the wonderfully lush foliage that was grown for scientific purposes there he would also have seen animals at the botanical gardens the Jardin des Plantes which you can still visit today in Paris has a zoo next to it and these two things were very much aligned and in the 1800s artists would go to the Jardin des Plantes and they would study the animals there to use in their artwork so Rousseau certainly wasn't the only artist who would have done this and we do have a sense there that he would have he would have enjoyed observing animals but also he would have seen the the way in which other artists described these animals not only French artists but perhaps Japanese artists there were a lot of Japanese prints in circulation in Paris in the late 1800s and Rousseau was very visually aware and often took ideas from many many different sources to to use to his own ends and what about the story at work well this too is very much of its time now even zooming in close we see that we can't see specific features on the figures in Rousseau's scene and so we get the impression really that they are simply an excuse to create a drama and I think this is quite poignant for us at the moment because we're in a stage where we aren't able to travel and to move or maybe to to see things from many different angles and so we're very reliant on the media we're very reliant on newspapers on what we might see on screen now in Rousseau's day the equivalent would have been newspapers but also the cinema this was a moment where cinema was very new and there was a lot of documentary footage coming from overseas real exploration if you like a sense of discovery and can you imagine the excitement that people must have felt when they saw images of far-flung places for the first time now the challenge with all of this is that as much as there was a wonderment with discovering new worlds there was also a lot of confusion and a lot of fantasy and a lot of fear and a lot of mixed messaging that surrounded stories of overseas and for Rousseau in France he would have been on the receiving end of all of this and it's interesting to see what he makes of it as much as people were interested in the scientific truth of travel and discovery there was also an aspect of fantasy of excitement what might these places be like what might go on what about the struggle between animals and humans and all of this is played out in this painting which I think really has its finger on the pulse of a very particular moment in French history when France was a colonial power so was heavily involved in controlling other countries dominating other countries and really championing that to a French audience back home so when you do see this picture do remember that what we have here is something that really speaks to our sense of imagination and the wonders of that and the dangers of that it's a it's a very interesting picture and I think one that feels very relevant at the moment and there is just something so wonderful visually about Rousseau and the richness of the colour the way in which pieces are painted out and so as I say when you do come back to the barns please have a look at this picture in a fresh light and before then please carry on joining us for barns takeout there'll be more of the same tomorrow you can subscribe on our youtube channel thanks so much I'm Tom Collins new Bauer family executive director of the barns foundation I hope you enjoyed barns takeout subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art thanks for watching and for your support of the barns foundation