Children Wrestling
Paul Gauguin (1848 to 1903) · 1888
Two boys in short trunks grapple on a slope of bright green grass, one gripping the other around the waist, their bare feet braced. A third boy watches from the water at the top of the picture, and in the lower corner lie a straw hat and a pile of discarded clothes. Gauguin painted this in the summer of 1888 at Pont-Aven in Brittany, where wrestling matches were held at village festivals and where the local boys swam in the river. He wrote to his friend Émile Schuffenecker that he had painted a Breton wrestling scene that he thought was unlike anything else, and that it would please a Japanese.
That last remark is the key. Look at how flat the picture is. The meadow tips up toward you with no real perspective; the figures are outlined in dark contours and filled with plain colour; the third child is barely modelled at all. Gauguin had discovered Japanese woodblock prints through Van Gogh the previous year, and here he applies their lessons: bold silhouettes, a high viewpoint, empty space used as a shape. The clothes and hat in the foreground are the only clue to depth. The wrestlers are deliberately out of proportion, as if drawn rather than observed, and the grass is painted in short strokes that read as pattern more than texture.
The painting marks the moment Gauguin turned away from Impressionism toward the simplified, symbolic style he would develop in Brittany and later in Tahiti. It passed through several private collections before the museum bought it in 2010, one of its first major purchases. In the galleries it hangs in the chapter on the modern world, where it can be compared with the Japanese prints that inspired it.
Did You Know? Gauguin told a friend that this painting of Breton boys wrestling was made to look like a Japanese print, and that it would please a Japanese viewer.
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