Brendan Gallagher delves into some of rugby’s most enduring images, their story and why they are still so impactful
What’s happening here?
You might well ask! It’s 1908 and Henri Rousseau, the French post-impressionist painter and the inspiration for many avant garde artists not least Pablo Picasso, has turned his attention to the new sport of rugby that was beginning to fascinate the artistic elite in Paris.
This is entitled, perhaps in error, as ‘the Footballers’ although of course during this period the game worldwide was often referred to simply as Rugby Football.
Art historians though have confirmed that rugby was the subject matter and the oval ball, the handling element and the flimsy attempt at a tackle confirm this. It currently hangs in the Guggenheim in New York.
What’s the story being the picture?
Rugby was the coming sport in France in the first decade of the 20th century. The big French Cup finals – invariably featuring Bordeaux, Racing, Stade Francais and Toulouse – were national occasions and France had won the first Olympic title in 1900 when they defeated club sides from Great Britain and Germany.
In 1906 France played their first full scale Test match against Dave Gallaher’s all-conquering All Blacks while later that year they played England.
In 1907 the Springboks were honoured visitors and there was a growing curiosity with the sport among France’s intellectual circles. Outwardly a thuggish and barbarian activity it was nonetheless the physical outlet of choice of lawyers, medics, students, military men and the idle rich.
The working class were soon to follow but in these early years it was an elitist activity.
What happened next
Where Rousseau led others quickly followed. Suddenly a phalanx of talented French artists, mainly Parisian, turned their attention to rugby and sport.
Chief among these were the godfathers of cubism Albert Gleizes and Jean Metziner, who were fascinated by the subject matter. For a brief period of time rugby, along with cycling, was the adopted sport of the painting fraternity.
Iconic Rugby Pictures:
PART 58
The Footballers by artist Henri Rousseau 1908
Why is the picture iconic?
First, along with Gleizes ‘Football players’ – which hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC – it is rugby’s most valuable piece of art, worth many millions should it ever come up in auction.
One of its big appeals is that it has totally baffled art critics. Its provenance is sound as a pound and it is manifestly in the Rosseau tradition of including dense forest and foliage – he was famed mainly for his depiction of jungles – and his trademark childlike feet but what on earth is going on? Why are two sets of identical twins frolicking in the forest in their pyjamas?
“The twins are an homage to the brotherhood of a rugby team”
The character attempting to catch the ball is universally accepted by art historians as a self portrait, of sorts, of Rousseau even if he was 64 when he painted this, an ailing man close to death.
What are the subliminal messages? Well, Rousseau was the godfather of ‘irrational’ avant garde art, his pictures are not meant to make sense – but here’s my take anyway. The identical twins in both sets of team colours are surely an homage to the brotherhood of a rugby team. You become a close family, the individual ego is flattened for the good of the team.
The French coined the descriptive phrase Le Rugbyman around this time and it’s a generic term that Rousseau has seized on. Le Rugbymen all shared the same traits and qualities, probably the same social and educational breeding. You were of a type and would be instantly recognised. You were indivisible, identical.
But why are they in a clearing in the forest, not a marked out pitch in one of France’s many fine stades or velodromes of the era? Well now it gets very deep and speculative but France’s obsession with sport at this time was partly viewed through the prism of human evolution.
It was the natural development of mankind now he was free to pursue frivolities and sport for sport’s sake. Instead of fighting for survival in the jungle – or this case the forest – men now challenged themselves physically on the sports field.
That’s what the modern day Olympics was all about – devised by a rugby-loving Frenchman Pierre De Coubertin in 1896 – while the Tour de France was dreamt up in 1903 to see just how hard the human body could be driven. Its founder Henri Desgrange, ideally, wanted just one rider to finish the race. Rousseau viewed rugby as part of this dreamy sporting romanticism.
Footnote: Like many artists Rousseau –a customs officer by profession – was chronically under-appreciated during his lifetime and his work resonated at the time only among his fellow artists and peers. He died just 18 months after painting this, before the piece had gained its cache, and alas there is no recorded explanation from him as to what it’s all about. Which was of course the making of the picture.
