La Mariée (Têtes à Massacre) / The Bride (Aunt Sallys) (1907)

Traditionally, in the UK, the 17th-century game ‘Aunt Sally’ was played in pub gardens and at fairgrounds whereby sticks were thrown at a ball or a figure. In France it is called ‘jeu de massacre’. This life-size picture was for years misleadingly called just ‘The Bride’ or when exhibited in 1907 ‘The Bride (puppets)’ until the artist himself changed it in 1953 to ‘Têtes à Massacre’ as he said the bride was not real.

It was purchased by the Contemporary Art Society with its new Foreign Fund from the CAS Hon. Secretary Ivor Spencer-Churchill’s friend Percy Moore Turner’s Independent Gallery, London in 1925. It was accepted by the Tate Gallery 10 years later and 5 years before Rouault’s Les trois juges (The Three Judges) was acquired, also by the Tate, from the Montague Shearman bequest to the CAS.

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