Artists and writers who journeyed to the coast of Western Brittany were fascinated by the
spectacle of local festive displays such as the yearly religious pardons at St. Anne de Palud. But
instead of understanding ritual festivities on the Brittany coast as simply the encounter of an
outsider and his or her rural other, we can read these events as collective experiences that provided
many ways to be both spectacle and spectator. This article departs from previous studies of art in
Brittany in two significant ways: it considers the experience of local travel to coastal festivities
(such as pardons) rather than taking tourism only to mean travel on a wider national or international
scale. It also widens the focus of previous critical considerations of pardons in paintings to
an expanded archive of visual and material culture from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Rather than equating rural life and representations of it with an outsider’s longings for an imaginary
past, I employ methodologies drawn from feminist cultural criticism and the anthropology of
material culture to view Breton pardons and their forms of visual culture as vibrant and ever
changing performances and mediations of place and cultural identity. I consider these yearly public
rituals as occasions that are marked as separate from ordinary daily routine yet that are also retrospectively
integrated to everyday experience through their material and visual culture. Although
paintings are central to my argument, this article takes a short detour away from concerns with
artistic representation in order to engage with the bodily experience of the pardon, and then makes
a return to the visual.