Henri Rousseau: Tropical Forest with Monkeys (Detail), 1910 – Porcelain Art Mug

Rousseau never left France. The jungle he painted for forty years was assembled in Paris — from the hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes, from the zoo next door, from a picture book of wild animals, and from the plants on his own windowsill, enlarged until a houseplant became a tree.

This is one of the last canvases he finished; he died in the autumn of 1910. The leaves are laid on in flat overlapping planes, each one drawn with its own edge, and the greens are counted rather than blended — contemporaries said he mixed more than fifty of them.

The picture is not a scene so much as a wall of foliage with animals set into it: a grey langur in the middle, orange monkeys swinging at the right, a bird, and a fishing rod that one of them is holding, which nobody has ever satisfactorily explained.

This mug carries a detail, not the whole canvas: the langur among the white blossoms, with the red-leaved plants closing the picture at the bottom. The complete painting is shown in the last product image. The printable field on a mug is about nine centimetres high; a canvas of 129 by 162 centimetres would shrink to a stamp, so the mug takes the group the painting is built around.

Fine porcelain, 10 oz — 104 mm high, 75 mm across the base. The image runs around the body; handle and rim stay white. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Henri Rousseau, Tropical Forest with Monkeys, 1910. Oil on canvas, 129.5 × 162.5 cm. Open access, public domain.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.