La Guerre

Rousseau showed this at the Salon des Independants in 1894, the exhibition with no jury, where anyone could hang a canvas. Most viewers laughed at it. War rides across the picture as a wild woman in white on a black horse, over a plain of broken trees and scattered corpses with crows already picking at them. Rousseau was a self-taught painter holding down a customs job, and critics treated his flat, blunt shapes as the mistakes of an amateur. One person who took it seriously was a 20-year-old writer, Alfred Jarry, who would soon shock Paris with his play about the monstrous King Ubu. Jarry admired the picture, and the two men became friends.