Classroom Activity

Art Starters: Henri Rousseau

Part of Art Tales for Pre-K

Henri Rousseau never saw a real jungle! To make his jungle paintings, he first visited the botanical garden and zoo in Paris, drawing the tropical plants and animals he saw there. At home in his studio, he combined and changed the plants in his sketches to create imaginary jungles for animals from different parts of the world.

Five monkeys rest and play amid a lush jungle landscape in this horizontal landscape painting. Painted with areas of flat color, thick vegetation fills most of the scene, with giant leaves overlapping in shades of green. At the bottom center, a large brown monkey sits upright on a rock, looking directly at us. To our left, two gray and black monkeys climb in trees, and also face us. To our right, two rust-orange monkeys swing in trees. The orange of their fur is echoed in spiky, pumpkin-orange flowers to the right. Dark red leafy plants with spiky white flowers fill the lower left corner of the painting. A cloudless, pale blue sky stretches across the top of the composition. The artist signed and dated the painting with white letters in the lower right: “Henri Rousseau 1910.”
Henri Rousseau, Tropical Forest with Monkeys, 1910, oil on canvas, John Hay Whitney Collection, 1982.76.7

Grade Level

Subject

Language

Look

How many animals can you find in this painting? Pretend you are one of the animals—do what they are doing.

What color do you see the most? Find different shades of that same color.

Do you think this is a real place or an imaginary place? Why?

What other creatures might be hiding here?

Imagine you are traveling to this jungle. What would you need to wear? What would you plan to do? What would it be like there?

Create a story to go along with this painting. What might happen next?

Read

The Perfect Animal (Spanish langauge version: El animal perfecto)
by Raquel Díaz Reguera

Valentina imagines what it would feel like to be different animals as she thinks about an animal costume for class.

The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau
by Michelle Markel and Amanda Hall

This book offers the biography of Rousseau and how he taught himself to paint, creating imagined worlds through his art.

Make: Create an imaginary jungle

You Will Need

  • Heavyweight paper
  • Paints
  • Paintbrushes
  • Crayons or colored pencils (optional)

Before you begin, you might want to visit a garden or park and, like Henri Rousseau, draw the plants you see there. Notice the colors and shapes of the leaves, and how they are arranged on their stems.

To create your own imaginary jungle, first paint a background of sky and soil (or use colored paper). Add trees, branches, stems, and leaves, referring to your sketches for ideas as you paint. Try mixing paints—add black or blue to green for dark greens, and yellow or white to green for lighter greens.

Are there any animals hiding in your jungle? If so, go ahead and add them now!

After the paint dries, you may want to use crayons or colored pencils to add the final details to your imaginary jungle.

Vocab Bank

  • jungle
  • palm
  • reptile
  • tropical

Download

Art Tales: Coloring and Cut-Outs booklet (PDF, 3.5 MB)

Art Tales for Pre-K (PDF, 7.2 MB)

Primeros Pasos En El Arte (PDF, 7.5 MB)

Primeros Pasos En El Arte: Colorear y Recortes (PDF, 3.7 MB)

Rousseau in the Jungle lesson plan

Visit

Register for the Art Tales pre-K school tour

Submit Student Work

Send images of your students' projects that follow these activities - email [email protected]

You may also like

The sculpture has elongated, thin legs sprawled out in various directions. It is made of bronze, giving it a dark, metallic appearance that contrasts with its surroundings. At the center of all the legs is a cylindrical shape elevated off the ground which appears to be a body. There are grooves and indentations along the legs and body. The setting is outdoors, in a garden or park area, with grass and hedges surrounding the sculpture. In the background, there are trees with foliage in shades of orange and yellow. There are also several outdoor chairs visible under the trees.

Educational Resource:  Art Starters: Louise Bourgeois

A lesson for preschool to kindergarten students about artist Louise Bourgeois' sculpture Spider. Students learn how to look at this sculpture, what you can read to learn more, how to create your own symbolic sculpture, and a list of vocabulary terms related to this activity.

Made with mostly square or rectangular pieces of patterned paper in shades of asparagus and moss green, sky blue, tan, and ash brown, a man with brown skin sits in the center of this horizontal composition with a second person over his shoulder, in the upper left corner of this collage. The man’s facial features are a composite of cut-outs, mostly in shades of brown and gray, as if from black-and white photographs, and he smokes a cigarette. He sits with his body angled slightly to our right and he looks off in that direction, elbows resting on thighs and wrists crossed. His button-down shirt and pants, similarly collaged, are mottled with sky blue and white. One foot, on our right, is created with a cartoonish, shoe-shaped, black silhouette. The paper used for the other foot seems to have been scraped and scratched, creating the impression that that foot is bare. A tub, made of the same blue and white paper of the man’s suit, sits on the ground to our left, in the lower corner. The man sits in front of an expanse made up of green and brown pieces of paper patterned with wood grain, which could be a cabin. In a window in the upper left, a woman’s face, her features similarly collaged, looks out at us. One dark hand, large in relation to the people, rests on the sill with the fingers extended down the side of the house. The right third of the composition is filled collaged scraps of paper patterned to resemble leafy trees. Closer inspection reveals the form of a woman, smaller in scale than the other two, standing in that zone, facing our left in profile near a gray picket fence. She has a brown face, her hair wrapped in a patterned covering, and she holds a watermelon-sized, yellow fruit with brown stripes. Several blue birds and a red-winged blackbird fly and stand nearby. Above the woman and near the top of the composition, a train puffs along the top of what we read as the tops of trees. The artist signed the work in black letters in the upper right corner: “romare bearden.”

Educational Resource:  Art Starters: Romare Bearden

A lesson for preschool to kindergarten students about artist Romare Bearden’s collage Tomorrow I May Be Far Away. Students learn how to look at this collage, what you can read to learn more, how to create a collage, and a list of vocabulary terms related to this activity.

Two angular, cream-white buildings flanking a central, stylized tree are surrounded by brown soil, small animals, and farmhouse objects like watering cans and buckets beneath a clear, azure-blue sky in this square landscape painting. We look straight onto the buildings and slightly down onto the earth in front of us. About a third of the way up the composition, the horizon is lined with trees and mountains in the deep distance. The long, spindly branches of the central tree nearly reach the top edge of the painting and abstracted, sickle-shaped leaves are silhouetted against the sky so no leaves overlap. The far edge of the whitewashed structure to our left is cropped. The façade is pierced by two small rectangular windows and an arched hatch at the top under a winch. The back end of a horse is visible through an open door at the bottom center. Horizontal bands in front of the building suggest furrows in plowed earth, and a single stalk of corn grows up into the scene, seeming close to us. A pen protected by netting stretches out in front of the second structure, to our right of center. That wood-frame building has a triangular peaked roof, and the left half is open, like a lean-to. A goat, rooster, birds, and several rabbits occupy the pen. Watering cans, buckets and pails, a hoe, newspaper, lizard, and snail are spaced around the buildings. A tiny stylized person, perhaps a baby, appears in the distance between the buildings near a well where a woman works. A covered wagon, a round mill, trees, and plants fill the rest of the space between the buildings. A disk-like moon hangs in the sky to the right of the tree. The artist signed and dated the lower left corner, "Miro. 1921-22."

Educational Resource:  Art Starters: Joan Miró

A lesson for preschool to kindergarten students about artist Joan Miró’s painting The Farm. Students learn how to look at this painting, what you can read to learn more, how to create a collage, and a list of vocabulary terms related to this activity.