Tiger in the Jungle

Paul Ranson was a member of the Nabis (the Prophets), a group of artists in fin-de-siècle France who were interested in art as a vehicle for symbolic meanings rather than realistic representation. Ranson alluded to Japanese art throughout his many works and was therefore known as “the Nabi more japonard than the japonard” (“japonard” was coined to rhyme with the name of a fellow Nabi, Pierre Bonnard). His Tiger in the Jungle bears close resemblances to woodblock prints of tigers by Kitagawa Utamaro and Katsushika Hokusai. Although Ranson likely intended for the arabesque shapes—particularly the tiger’s stripes—to evoke Chinese ink drawings, the lithographic print medium was quite atypical of Asian art. Tiger in the Jungle won instant prestige upon its inclusion in André Marty’s first L’Estampe originale album, a gold standard of late-19th-century French printmaking, in 1893.

Resource: Chelsea Foxwell and Anne Leonard, Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints, exh. cat. (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2012), pp. 148–51.