Jaguar Attacking a Horse 1910

Henri Rousseau made "Jaguar Attacking a Horse," with oil on canvas. The color palette is wild, a bit artificial, and super green. It feels like he's inventing the jungle as he goes, right? Look at how the paint is laid down, kind of flat, like he’s building up the image piece by piece. And that texture! The leaves are so dense, you can almost feel the humidity. The horse, caught in the jaguar's grasp, its limbs splayed, is kind of shocking. It’s like a snapshot of raw, untamed nature. Rousseau's dreamlike visions remind me a bit of someone like Max Ernst, who also conjured surreal landscapes. But where Ernst veered into the Freudian, Rousseau remains somehow innocent, like a kid with a box of crayons. His work is a reminder that art can be both beautiful and unsettling, and that sometimes the most powerful images come from the depths of our imagination.