Henri Rousseau - The Flamingoes Baby Blanket

The Flamingoes / Les Flamants (Les flamants roses), painted in 1907 in oil on canvas by French Naïve artist Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier, is one of his imaginary tropical jungle paintings. Rousseau never traveled to the tropics; he assembled such worlds from botanical observation, illustrated journals, novels, postcards and other printed sources, giving them their distinctive collage-like unreality. Flamingoes gather beside water and monumental tropical plants, but the scene is less naturalistic observation than an invented paradise characteristic of Rousseau's mature jungle imagery. Long held in private collections, Les Flamants sold for $43.535 million at Christie's New York in 2023, setting an auction record for Rousseau.