Rural Women’s Religiosity, Modern art and Third Republic Politics

Maura Coughlin

French painter Charles Cottet made his reputation in the Salons of Paris with images of pious and mourning peasant women from coastal Brittany.  Rural Breton women had often been represented in French art and literature as icons of resistance to the uprooting forces of modernity: they stayed in place and kept alive the rituals of domestic and agricultural labor.  Differing from both academic naturalist painters and avant gard primitivists whose pastoral images of Brittany filled Parisian exhibitions, Cottet specialized in representations of child mortality, death at sea and the religious
practices of those left behind on the seashore. The Breton grieving rituals that Cottet depicts were responses to high rates of infant mortality and death at sea in Breton coastal communities Widows on the almost exclusively female island of Ouessant were a staple of his celebrated imagery: their patience, perseverance and piety at burials, in mourning, solitary and lost in thought at the edge of the sea. Generally speaking, the peasant family was often celebrated in French art and popular culture as an organic social unit that was rooted to the land, but on Ouessant, a divided family of nomadic men and sedentary women  provided an altogether different paradigm. Although he is little known today, Cottet was a favorite artist of middle-of- the-road arts administrators in the Third Republic.  How did Cottet’s work, which seems so tied to specifics of place, speak to a larger agenda of French nationalism and Catholic revivalist conservatism?  Why was his work so well received (and then abruptly forgotten)?  This paper examines the shifting critical reception of Cottet’s work from the 1890s to the First World War and
employs methodology from feminist art history and the anthropology of  material culture.