War (La Guerre)

Henri Rousseau

Oil on canvas

Musée d'Orsay

War (La Guerre), painted circa 1894, is one of Henri Rousseau's most ambitious and sobering works. At its center, a grimacing female figure—evoking Bellona, the Roman goddess of war—rides a wild black horse across a desolate landscape, brandishing a sword and a flaming torch. Below her, the dark ground is covered with corpses being consumed by crows, while charred trees frame a scene dominated by the colors of mourning and blood, with the green of hope entirely absent. Rousseau, a self-taught French painter known as "Le Douanier," rendered this allegory in his distinctive Naïve style: flattened forms, an unreal spatial tension, and a directness of image that transcends academic convention.