レスラーたち

Courbet sent this to the Paris Salon of 1853, where it hung beside his large picture of two nude bathers and drew the same outrage. Critics were used to wrestlers borrowed from ancient sculpture, heroic and smooth. What Courbet gave them were two real, heavy, straining men he had watched grapple in the open-air arena on the Champs-Elysees, their muscles and reddened skin painted without flattery. The Paris of Napoleon III wanted its art polished, and this deliberate plainness read as almost a provocation. The canvas later travelled far from home. A wealthy Hungarian collector, Ferenc Hatvany, bought it in 1908, and after the upheavals of the Second World War it came to rest in a museum in Budapest, where it hangs today.