Provenance
(Durand-Ruel, Paris); possibly (sale, The Durand-Ruel Collection of French Paintings, Moore's Art Galleries, New York, 5-6 May 1887, no. 5).[1] (Durand-Ruel, New York); purchased 1898 by William A. Clark [1839-1925], New York;[2] bequest April 1926 to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2015 by the National Gallery of Art.
[1] According to an annotated copy of the sale catalogue, a painting by this title sold for $210. No buyer is listed.
[2] The painting was included in an 1898 exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Galleries.
Accession Number
2015.19.21
Medium
oil on wood
Dimensions
overall: 26.67 × 45.72 cm (10 1/2 × 18 in.) | framed: 40.96 × 61.28 × 6.35 cm (16 1/8 × 24 1/8 × 2 1/2 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Corcoran Collection (William A. Clark Collection)
Tags
Painting Impressionist & Modern (1851–1900) Oil Painting French
Background & Context
Background Story
Fair in Brittany, painted in 1874, depicts a traditional Breton fair, its market stalls and crowd of participants filling a village square under the ever-changing Norman sky. The painting belongs to Boudin occasional investigation of the traditional cultures of northwestern France, which he documented with the same attentive directness he brought to the fashionable beaches.
Brittany, with its Celtic traditions and its conservative rural culture, provided French painters with one of their most popular subjects. Boudin treatment of the Breton fair distinguishes itself from the more Romantic approach of Gauguin by its matter-of-fact observation and its refusal of exoticism. His Breton fair is not a spectacle of otherness but a market day - a place of commerce, socializing, and the practical business of rural life.
The painting most distinctive quality is its combination of figure painting and atmosphere. The crowd, rendered in Boudin characteristic rapid notation, is both a social document and a composition of color: the Breton costumes, with their white coifs and dark dresses, create a pattern of light and dark that echoes the clouds and shadows above. The sky, as always in Boudin, is the dominant element, its towering clouds organizing the composition and determining the quality of light that falls across the entire scene.
Cultural Impact
Boudin Breton fair paintings documented the traditional cultures of northwestern France at a moment of transition, when industrialization and tourism were beginning to transform rural life. His treatment of the fair as a subject for serious landscape painting, rather than picturesque genre, influenced the tradition of social observation in French art.
Why It Matters
Fair in Brittany captures Boudin democratic vision: the same loving attention to sky, light, and atmosphere that he brought to the beaches of Deauville he here applies to a Breton market day. The fair, under its vast sky, is both a specific event and a demonstration of Boudin central conviction: that every subject, seen with fresh eyes, contains all the beauty that art requires.
