"... and this is underlined by the fact that there is no clear path on which she might continue." -Martha Lucy, The Barnes Foundation: Masterworks (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2012), 199-200.

...of her torso, eclipse part of her face while oranges almost twice the size of her head dangle from trees high above. Wearing a hat and a long pink dress cinched at the waist, the woman appears better suited for a manicured Parisian park. She is clearly out of her element, to an absurd degree..."

"Here Henri Rousseau takes a seemingly ordinary subject—a woman out for a stroll in the woods—and makes it strange. Most startling is perhaps the scale of the solitary figure, who stands dwarfed by oversized plants and invented purple flowers. Giant leaves, each the size..."

One of my childhood's most haunting movie scenes is from THE SECRET GARDEN (1993) when Mary dreams about her deceased mother. I recognized one of the scene's visual inspirations in Henri Rousseau's WOMAN WALKING IN AN EXOTIC FOREST, which underlines Mary's mother's doomed fate.

Using the 'nude in recline' pose popularized throughout art history and with mirror in hand, Divine's introduction in the MULTIPLE MANIACS draws a delightful parallel to the goddess of love herself, Venus, particularly with Diego Velázquez's THE TOILET OF VENUS.