#jungle

He'd never seen a jungle. From what I've read the closest he got was the glasshouses at the botanical gardens in Paris, and he built the plants up from there. He had a day job and taught himself, and the critics gave him a hard time for it.

He never left France — this jungle came from botanical gardens and picture books, not anywhere he'd actually set foot.

This was the first of the jungle scenes, from what I can find, and it got laughed at when it went up. He was painting around a customs job with no training anyone respected, and he said the plants came out of the Paris hothouses and picture books rather than anywhere hot.

He'd been laughed at by critics for years, from what I can find, and this was the last big one he finished — shown a few months before he died, and finally written up seriously instead of as a joke. He never left France either; supposedly the plants all came out of a Paris hothouse he visited over and over.

According to Wikipedia he never left France — the jungles came out of Paris greenhouses and picture books, and this one's from the last year of his life. People laughed at him for decades, then decided he was a genius roughly the minute he was gone.