Focus on Les Joueurs de football and explore the Rugby football.
The apparition of The Football Players (1908) in the work of Henri Rousseau signaled the emergence of sporting events as a subject for art. Jean Metzinger painted At the Cycle-Race Track (Au Vélodrome) (1911–12) Peggy Guggenheim Collection; Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Cyclist (1913), Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Dynamism of a Soccer Player (1913) Museum of Modern Art. Robert Delaunay worked on a series of rugby football scenes from 1912 to 1913, and again in 1924. André Lhote, later, painted the subject several times, between 1917 and 1937. In both the Gleizes painting and those of Delaunay, the identification with soccer has commonly been made, however, the ball is oval and the hands are being used; clearly identifying the subject of these works as depictions of rugby football games.The first rugby competition was held in 1892 as a one-off championship game between two Paris-based teams, the Racing Club de France and Stade Français. In 1900 rugby was played at the Paris Summer Olympics. France won the gold medal of the first ever rugby event at the Olympics. Racing Club made it to the championship final on 31 March 1912. France joined an international competition in 1910, and coined the term Tournoi des Cinq Nations (Five Nations Championship); a term that would last almost the entire century. On 1 January 1913, at the France-Scotland match, spectators threw themselves on the referee to express their dissatisfaction. The mounted police were forced to intervene charging. This violent incident led to the secretary of the Scottish Rugby Union to declare: "If the game can only be played under the protection of the police or the military, it is not worth playing". Following this incidents, Scotland refused to face France at the 1914 tournament. France was implicitly excluded from further tournaments, but World War I did not permit the application of this exclusion.
The related sport-themed work of Rousseau, Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Boccioni (and later Lhote), reflected the enthusiasm for sport that fascinated the French spirit at the time. Romain Rolland described the Belle Époque generation as "Passionately in love with pleasure and violent games", in his 1912/13 novel Jean-Christophe. Art historian Daniel Robbins writes:The role of team sport, especially in the context of mass audience participation, reflects another interest of the artists of Passy. Jacques Nayral was occasionally a sports writer (cf. L’Action Nouvelle, February 25, 1914) and a fan (as was Delaunay) of foot and bicycle racing. Gleizes' Football Players dates from the same year as Delaunay’s Cardiff Team.
André Lhote Au Vélodrome Belle Époque Dynamism of a Cyclist Henri Rousseau Jean-Christophe Jean Metzinger Museum of Modern Art Peggy Guggenheim Collection Robert Delaunay Romain Rolland Rugby football Stade Français Umberto Boccioni World War I