Breton Wrestling

Gouren, the Breton wrestling still practised today, has one aim, to throw your opponent flat on his back. Here two barefoot young wrestlers grip each other by the shoulders on a yellow-green field, in the white linen shirts and dark trousers of Breton country dress. The Musée d'Orsay dates the canvas to 1890 or 1891. The Sérusier catalogue raisonné puts it a little later, around 1892 or 1893, at Châteauneuf-du-Faou in inland Brittany, and recognises the women's white headdresses as the local style of that town. Those women fill the back of the picture, rows of them in black, with a few men and children among them. The picture stayed with the painter, then his widow, before a bequest brought it to the state in 1984. At the edge of the crowd, standing apart, a gendarme in a bicorne hat keeps watch over the match.