Henri Rousseau – La Guerre

La Guerre – a hand-painted reproduction

The sky is blue at the upper left with rose-pink and grey cloud, turning ochre-orange
along the horizon to the right. Across the middle a dark, long-bodied, maned creature leaps
with its legs splayed and its head to the right. Astride it sits a young figure in a white
short-sleeved shift, bare-legged and barefoot, long dark hair streaming out on both sides,
with a wide fixed grin showing the teeth. The raised right hand holds a pale sword blade; the
left holds a dark torch that glows red and trails a long grey-brown plume of smoke across the
sky. Bare dark branches with dark leaves reach in from the left; at the right stands a pale
grey-white bare trunk. Below lie a dark ridge and an ochre plain. The whole foreground is
strewn with pale naked bodies lying among dark red earth and dark stones, and black birds
with spread wings stand among them. At the lower right is the dark signature Henri
Rousseau.

What is on this canvas

This is an allegory, not scenic decoration. The lower third of the picture is a field of
the dead and the upper is a calm clouded sky, and the painter does not separate the two: the
same precise hand drew the plume of smoke and every body. That evenness is exactly what makes
the canvas heavy. If you want the same tension without human casualties, see Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo or Scouts Attacked by a Tiger,
where the violence is between animals and stays inside nature.

An allegory we do not interpret

Who the rider is we do not claim. Neither the museum record nor the painting names them;
what is visible is a young figure with a sword and a torch on a dark animal. Nor do we name
any war, battle or year – the title is an abstraction and we treat it as one. A related
construction, where a figure carries the meaning instead of an event, appears in The Past and the Present. The
opposite pole from the same hand, a celebration instead of a devastation, is A Centennial of Independence.

What it means on the wall

The original measures 114 cm x 195 cm and is the widest canvas in this group; the
proportion is markedly elongated, almost a band. That is why it needs a wide wall and some
distance: at small sizes the foreground collapses into a smudge, while at large sizes it
reads as a narrative from left to right. We do not reproduce canvases at the original
measurement; you choose the size for your wall.

How a hand-painted reproduction is made

Every canvas is painted by hand in oils, to order, in the size you choose. The painter
works from a high-resolution photograph of the original, layer by layer, so that the plume of
smoke, the mane of the dark animal and the bare branches stay legible at smaller sizes too.
Because this is hand work, two canvases of the same size always differ slightly; that is not
a fault but the difference between a painting and a print. Prices on this page start at
155 EUR for the smallest size.