Brittany 1892

Maxime Maufra painted ‘Brittany’ with oils on canvas in France at the turn of the 20th century. The image depicts a bend in a river surrounded by hills, painted in an impressionistic style. But to understand the work, we need to know something of Brittany itself, and also the institutional history of French painting at this time. Brittany was, and is, a region with a strong cultural identity, a place which many artists saw as more authentic than the increasingly industrialised cities. Maufra was part of a wave of artists who found inspiration there, and he also exhibited at the Salons of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. The politics of landscape painting are complex. On the one hand, images of the countryside can ignore social issues. On the other, they can offer a vision of an alternative to modernity. Art historians use a range of resources to explore the social context of paintings like this, from exhibition catalogues to census records, in order to understand the relationship between art and society.