Maurice Grün 1870-1947
Breton Girls, the Harbour Concarneau
Oil on canvas, 79 x 91 cm.
Signed, lower-left
Grün was a portrait and genre painter. Often described as Russian, he was actually born in Réval/Tallinn, capital of Estonia. He moved to Paris to study with Jules Lefebre and Tony Robert-Fleury at the Académie Julian, from 1890-1893. He was naturalised a French citizen in 1910 and, although he travelled extensively living and working in the US, Brazil, Paris and London, he returned to France again and again.
Alongside hundreds of other artists from the various écoles, Grün spent the summer months in Brittany in what became a vibrant international colony; we know specifically he was in Concarneau between 1900 and 1906, and again from 1914-1919.
This painting was executed around the turn of the century. In the 1870s and ‘80s, Pont-Aven was the place to be, ceding popularity to Concarneau in the ‘90s and beyond. Apart from French artists, Brittany was frequented by artists from as far afield as America, Finland and Britain, not to mention Ireland where Aloysius O’Kelly, Henry Jones Thaddeus and Roderic O’Conor spent periods of time.
The painting shows the Passage Lanriec, from the Ville Close in Concarneau. To the left and right, we see the sardine boats with their faded rose, grey and tan sails, typical of the area.
The development of over 1,200 different kinds of coiffe reveals the rich typography of Breton dress in which infinitesimal variations revealed specifics concerning the locality and status of the individual, indicating subtleties of wealth, kinship and ethnicity. Before the turn of the century, girls would not have allowed themselves to be seen with uncovered hair. But these are more modern young women. Although dressed à la région, with their distinctive white linen coiffes and wide collars, fitted bodices, and work-a-day aprons, the girls are painted in a naturalistic mode, with a charming freshness and directness more typical of early twentieth-century work than more romanticised images from the late nineteenth century.
Niamh O’Sullivan