I love the elemental power of this painting. You could extrapolate the image here to every domain of human activity, 'tiger' economies, tiger warriors, pioneers, tigerish composers and writers, the indomitable human spirit. Though, of course, there is not a human to be seen!
Nevertheless, it suggests passion is necessary and part of the picture for Nature. Maybe Plato was wrong to see passion as a horse, which must be bridled and restrained. Rousseau's reflection was altogether different. And there is some irony that Jean-Jacques and Henri shared the same surname.
Finally, this painting, 'A Tiger Surprised in the Storm' puts me in mind of Walter Benjamin's Berlin Chronicle and Berlin Childhood Around 1900, written on the verge of suicide. (He later died of a morphine overdose on the Spanish Border, fleeing the Nazis).
Whenever the Kurfurstendamm flooded in Berlin, Benjamin stated: 'I felt particularly exposed to the elemental power of nature which made the city seem like a primeval forest'.
Curiously, Rousseau worked at the most sedentary/urbane, one might say, mundane occupation imaginable, and he had a great breadth of imagination.. Rousseau worked all his life as a toll-booth clerk.
But there is a primordial violence, as well, I think, as tenderness in this picture.
There is a savage possibility in all of us..
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