This summer, Paris is hosting the Olympic Games for the first time in over a hundred years. The Musée Marmottan Monet (MMM) is celebrating the occasion with an exhibition of works that reveal the rising interest in sports among all classes from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. The show, “En Jeu!: Artists and Sport, 1870–1930,” is endorsed by the International Olympic Committee.
Sports, of course, predate even antiquity. But in the nineteenth century, English public schools began to place a special emphasis on them, and that spirit soon traveled to republican France and the United States. It was this British love for games that had led Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington, allegedly to proclaim that “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,” meaning that Great Britain’s military success was a result of the values taught in the nation’s public schoolyards. Never mind the fact that Wellesley never said this: Eton didn’t have playing fields while he was there, and in any case he was bored by team games.
Be that as it may, the spirit of “fair play” and “playing the game” was exalted in England throughout the nineteenth century. The working classes increasingly began to have newfound time leisure time, which they filled with soccer or rugby; the upper classes preferred golf or horseback racing. “En Jeu!” contains depictions covering this entire socioeconomic spectrum, such as Gentlemen Jockeys before the Start (1862) on the one hand and Monet’s more democratic Skaters at Giverny (1899) on the other. People less inclined toward sports have long suffered since they have proliferated schools, of course—as is my case. I was consoled in my youth to read that Osbert Sitwell thought the teaching of sports at public schools would mar the country and any others aping the misguided mania for such recreation. Lady Diana Cooper had little taste for sports too, I might add.
Anti-sport though I may be, I found the MMM’s “En Jeu!” to be enjoyable, as the museum’s shows invariably are. Here are grand glorifications of sport alongside sharp satires of its ascendancy by artists such as Honoré Daumier and Félicien Rops, who both considered it one more example of human absurdity. The MMM goes out of its way to recover neglected artists from unjust obscurity, and this one calls from the benches Alcide Théophile Robaudi, Alexandre Falguière, Ferdinand Gueldry, and Frits Thaulow.
As a Philadelphia-region native, I was pleased to find three paintings by Thomas Eakins. The Philadelphia-born artist enjoyed rowing, and his John Biglin in a Single Scull (1874) shows a stalwart rower working up the Schuylkill River, familiar to every Philadelphian. Here, both the river and the rower impress with their strength. But even more vigor is on display in Eakins’s portrait of two years prior The Biglin Brothers Racing (1872), which shows the brawny siblings in blue bandanas under an almost-cloudless sky. It looks like one of those rare August days when Philadelphia’s humid summer haze lifts, granting a passing moment of magical serenity. Another Eakins, Between Rounds (1889), can be found in the exhibition’s lower level, near the museum’s holdings of Monet’s water-lily paintings.
It seems a moot point which is more barbaric, wrestling or boxing. Falguière’s Wrestlers (1875) shows two brawlers grappling in a dirt arena while a number of well-fed spectators look on with complacent brutishness. In Emile Friant’s The Match (1899), two young boys in their teens wrestle against a murky landscape. The placard tells us that the boys are fighting because they are obliged to rather than for pleasure, though you’d hardly know it from looking at them. More straightforwardly cheerful is Ferdinand Gueldry’s Match annuel à l’aviron entre le Rowing-Club de Paris et la Société nautique de la Marne (1882), depicting two teams of ten rowers racing under a bridge and cloudy sky. Kees van Dongen—always a fun addition—pits three lightning-fast jockeys against each other in The Race (1904). And Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is represented by his poster La Chaîne Simpson (1896), an advertisement for a bicycle race showing three men whose coiffures make them look like Tintin.
At the turn of the twentieth century, sports were mainly for men. But our century believes in equal time for the two sexes, and fortunately for the show’s curators, some artists of a hundred years past captured women as both athletes and spectators. Roubadi’s The Fencing Lesson (1887), for example, takes for its subject a young girl holding a rapier and wearing a mocking face. The glowing light emanating from behind the subject, the subtle chiaroscuro, and the fencer’s ruffled blouse indicate that the artist learned well from Velázquez. Maurice Denis’ Tennis I, Nausicaa, at the Ball Game (1913) places its mythic subject in the middle of a tennis match, lobbing the ball over the net, looking very much like an early-twentieth-century girl rather than a denizen of Homer’s Greece—still, Denis’s style, so influenced by Puvis de Chavannes, could well have illustrated Homer.
“En Jeu!” proves—even to the sports-allergic such as I—that these games can be fun to look at in an art gallery, even if they’re not so fun to watch for someone as sports-allergic as me.