This painting by Henri Rousseau is called Surprised! It's the first painting from a series of Jungle images that Rousseau painted from the comfort of his own studio in Paris. He was entirely self taught, self mythologising, but also innately confident in his talent, sometimes in the face of ridicule from the art establishment. His art was based upon observation - in the botanical and zoological gardens of Paris. He conjured the wild from his imagination. There are all kinds of other reasons why I like Rousseau, but the wild tigers are definitely the main one. 

I have been familiar with his paintings for decades, and we have sold versions of his work from time to time in calendars and on note cards. Paper Tiger folklore - and an old archive find that I made years ago - point to a three dimensional paper and card version of this tiger that appeared in our Lothian Road shop, when it first opened around thirty years ago.

It certainly inspired one of our earliest devices - this image below was used in print advertising and posters back in our early days in 1981.

It has been revisited over the years for stationery, business cards, street advertising, and is echoed today by the dark green paint colour that we use on the exterior of our stores. 

So Paper Tiger has always been in the jungle, and also of the jungle. Our meeting room is affectionately known as the Jungle Room. Our newsletter invites you to follow us into the jungle. The jungle is exciting, and the jungle can be wild. Although we are 40 this year, we are still wild.

The Jungle is where we share our thoughts, ideas, images and inspirations. So our news blog is now called The Jungle.