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Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret (1852-1929)
France, 1887
Oil on canvas
125 x 141 cm
Inv. no. 206
Naturalism’s popularity reached its peak in the late 1880s. Contemporary interest aroused by subjects involving detailed imagery of rural life explains this objective painting’s huge success at the 1889 Salon, where it won an award.
As an ethnographic image of pious customs, this painting shows the Pardon ceremony, an indulgence granted by the church to the faithful, and is used as a pretext for an analytical vision of a world that resisted the fin de siècle transformations. At that time, Brittany was the focus of great attention from artists painting in various different styles. Gaugin’s work can be used to establish one of the most striking contrasts with this canvas.
Photographs that Dagnan-Bouveret took in Rumengol helped to produce the end result, as did successively reworked portraits of individual models. This work, which the painter assembled in the studio, reveals considerable prior effort to establish the compositional construction and a complex methodology to organise the scene.
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