Here Henri Rousseau takes a seemingly ordinary subject—a women out for a stroll in the woods—and makes it strange. Most startling is perhaps the scale of the solitary figure, who stands dwarfed by oversize plants and invented purple flowers. Giant leaves, each the size of her torso, eclipse part of her face, while oranges almost twice the size of her head dangle from trees high above. Wearing a hat and a long pink dress cinched at the waist, the woman appears better suited for a manicured Parisian park. She is clearly out of her element, to an absurd degree, and this is underlined by the fact that there is no clear path on which she might continue.  Throughout his career Rousseau produced many pictures with unexpected juxtapositions, such as Carnival Evening, 1886 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), which shows a clown and a female companion in a moonlit forest. Here, however, the theme of incongruity receives a distinctly tropical setting. In 1904 Rousseau had just returned to a sustained focus on jungle landscapes after a thirteen-year hiatus from the subject. Gazing at the viewer with a look of vague surprise, the woman recalls the startled animals peering out from the artist's jungle pictures, as in Monkeys and Parrot in the Virgin Forest (BF397). But while in those works the monkeys' bewildered expressions convey the sense that the viewer has encroached upon their territory, here the woman's appearance only adds to the mystery, and the viewer is left to wonder why she is wandering through this overgrown landscape. Stylistically, the canvas is painted with the utmost precision: each individual leaf, each blade of grass, has its own fixed outline, a clarity that heightens the contrast with the obscured meaning of the scene.  Martha Lucy, The Barnes Foundation: Masterworks (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2012), 199-200.

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National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May 2-August 15, 1993; Musée d'Orsay, Paris, November 6, 1993-January 2, 1994; National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, January 21-April 3, 1994; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, April 24-August 16, 1994; Art Gallery of Ontario, September 17-December 31, 1994; Philadelphia Museum of Art, January 29-April 9, 1995; Haus der Kunst, Munich, June 23-October 22, 1995, "Great French Paintings from The Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Early Modern" [with title Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest (Femme se promenant dans une forêt exotique), 1905].