Tigre dans les jungles (Tiger in the Jungle)

André Marty announced his farsighted agenda for L'Estampe originale from the outset when he devoted most of the first album, in 1893, to the Nabis, the Hebrew word for prophet. These idealistic young artists first exhibited together in 1891. They met Saturdays in Paul Ranson's Paris studio to discuss, over beer and tea, new ways of representation. The Nabis were given to flat forms and expressive decoration, with meditative or mystical undercurrents. Coalesced in Ranson's tiger are the sinuous lines of Art Nouveau, the strong contours of Japanese woodcuts, and the antics of puppetry (Ranson kept a puppet theater in his studio). Ranson was also known to weave references to numerology and the occult into his works; the number five, he learned, represented sentient beings. The tiger pouncing amid the five irises could thus symbolize the relationship of nature to human intelligence.