It Was Our House

It Was Our House (c. 1914-1918) belongs to Forain's wartime series—.body of work that documented the destruction of Northern French towns during World War I with an emotional intensity that his pre-war satirical work had not attempted. The title—It Was Our House—carries the poignancy of displacement and loss: the house that was once a home has been destroyed, and the former residents are left with memory where shelter once stood. The 1914-18 date places this during the Great War, when Forain served as a war correspondent and artist, documenting the conflict's destruction with the same observational precision he had previously applied to Parisian social satire. The wartime work required Forain to extend his method: where his pre-war satires exposed the hypocrisies of bourgeois society, his wartime paintings exposed the physical and emotional destruction that war produced. The house—once a home, now a ruin—becomes a symbol of the civilian suffering that the war inflicted on Northern France. Forain's treatment of the destroyed house likely employs the rapid handling that his satirical work had developed, but the emotional register is entirely different: satire requires detachment, but the destroyed house requires compassion, and Forain's wartime work finds the emotional depth that his pre-war satires had concealed.

Forain's wartime paintings influenced how civilian suffering was represented in World War I art, documenting the destruction that transformed Northern France. The paintings influenced later war artists who similarly documented the home front's devastation. It Was Our House influenced how domestic loss was represented during wartime, connecting the specific destruction of houses to the universal experience of displacement.

This painting matters because it transforms Forain from a satirist of bourgeois hypocrisy into a chronicler of wartime loss—the house that was once a home becomes a symbol of the civilian suffering that war inflicts, and the title's poignancy reveals the emotional depth that Forain's pre-war satires had concealed but that wartime destruction demanded.