With respect to painting skills, Jaguar Attacking a Horse is perfection. Henri Rousseau was fond of telling his friends about his life in Mexico, about traveling and hunting in rain forests where he had never been. To paint the jungles, he worked in the Botanical Garden and Zoological Museum, and he used illustrated geographical atlases, postcards, stamps, and certainly his own artistic fantasy. This is how the fanciful world of this landscape was created. The massively disproportionate objects and strange details give the painting its atmosphere of mystery.