Henri Julien F�lix Rousseau (May 21, 1844 � September 2, 1910) was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naive or Primitive manner. He is also known as Le Douanier (the customs officer) after his place of employment. Ridiculed during his life, he came to be recognized as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality.
Rousseau's work exerted an "extensive influence ... on several generations of vanguard artists, starting with Picasso and including L�ger, Beckmann and the Surrealists," according to Roberta Smith, an art critic writing in The New York Times. "Beckmann�s amazing self-portraits, for example, descend from the brusque, concentrated forms of Rousseau�s portrait of the writer Pierre Loti".[3]
Rousseau's flat, seemingly childish style gave him many critics; people often were shocked by his work or ridiculed it. His ingenuousness was extreme, and he was unaware that establishment artists considered him untutored. He always aspired, in vain, to conventional acceptance. Many observers commented that he painted like a child and did not know what he was doing, but the work shows sophistication with his particular technique.
Do you think it could be the painting titled 'War', painted in 1894? The figure in the painting resembles a shepherd and is wearing a white robe of some kind, possibly fur, and seems to be jumping over the dead bodies in the battlefield.
