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This week’s choice of picture is Rugby Players by the self-taught artist Henri Rousseau. Painted in Paris in 1908, the work is now in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
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In creating this memorably strange picture of imaginary Frenchmen at play, “Le Douanier” Rousseau – so nicknamed because of his day job as a clerk in the Paris toll-service – paid no more attention to the rules of the fledgling sport of rugby than he did to prevailing conventions of artistic style.
Instead of the customary fifteen-a-side, two teams of two players are pitted against one another, on a pitch formed by a rectilinear grove in a wood of chestnut trees with leaves of autumnal gold. The joueurs de rugby in blue and white are clearly running rings around their busy-bee opponents, although were a referee present he would be duty bound to disallow the try which they are about to score: the player closest to the centre of Rousseau’s composition, who reaches up stiffly towards the floating, egg-shaped ball with a gesture of surprising balletic grace, has been released by what is clearly an illegal forward pass.
Rousseau kits out his mannequin sportsmen in matching striped shorts and shirts which resemble longjohns, or pajamas. Their hair is lavishly brilliantined, their splendid handlebar moustaches neatly waxed. They look like businessmen or office clerks exercising in their underwear.
