Breech

Breech is a subject in art. The gallery holds 73 works in this subject in art, including works by Édouard Manet, Count of St. Germain and Marie-Louise Carven.

In the vocabulary of Western dress and the art that records it, "breech" denotes breeches: the close-fitting, bifurcated male garment covering the body from waist to knee. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, breeches were the standard lower garment for European and American men, and they are accordingly ubiquitous in the portraiture and genre painting of those years. Cut to fasten with a buckle or band at or just below the knee—flared at the thigh when intended for riding—they were worn with stockings and, for the wealthy, rendered in silk, velvet, or fine wool whose sheen painters exploited to signal rank. A short-lived but vivid variant, the voluminous, skirt-like petticoat breeches, was fashionable among Western European men in the 1650s and early 1660s.

As a pictorial subject, breeches are less a movement than a recurring index of period, status, and gender. Court portraitists such as Anthony van Dyck and Diego Velázquez documented the garment in its most sumptuous forms, where the play of light across taut fabric became a vehicle for displaying both wealth and the painter's skill. The same garment defines specialized costume: the matador's tight knee breeches, the taleguilla of the traje de luces, are central to Édouard Manet's The Dead Toreador (c. 1864), held in this collection—a Spanish subject through which Manet absorbed the bold tonal contrasts of Velázquez.

Breeches also organize one of the most poignant conventions of family portraiture. Until breeching—the rite at which a boy, having worn gowns since infancy, was first put into breeches, usually between the ages of two and eight—children of both sexes appeared in skirts. Commissioned portraits frequently commemorate this passage, the new breeches marking a boy's entry into the "age of reason."

The garment's decline carried political weight. As tailcoats lengthened in the 1790s, breeches gave way to ankle-length pantaloons and trousers; in Revolutionary France, knee breeches read as aristocratic, and radicals proudly called themselves sans-culottes—"without breeches." By the early nineteenth century the garment had retreated to ceremonial and court use, where it survives still.