The Terraces
The ink — every line and halftone dot holds at full size

The Continent

The Armies at the Buffalo, March 1926

A French army side against a British one, eight years after the guns — football as the safe rematch.

Work
glass plate negative, Agence Rol, 11 March 1926
Maker
Agence Rol
Date
1926
Ground
Stade Buffalo, Montrouge
Era
The interwar game · 1919–1930
Source
Agence Rol / Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1926 · Wikimedia Commons
Some rematches are arranged precisely so that nothing is at stake.

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

The 11th of March, 1926, at the Stade Buffalo: the French army against the British. Eight years earlier these two armies had shared the worst ground in Europe, and a great deal of the football played between them in the 1920s was the same men, or their younger brothers, doing something else together on purpose. The service fixture was not a novelty; it was a deliberate institution, and the crowds took it seriously. This is the most quietly loaded photograph in the collection: two armies, one ball, a Paris afternoon. Some rematches are arranged precisely so that nothing is at stake.

See it on your wall

The piece, in the room it was made for

The Armies at the Buffalo, March 1926, printed large and framed — in the den, the club bar, the supporters’ bar. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

The Armies at the Buffalo, March 1926 framed on the wall
The Armies at the Buffalo, March 1926 framed on the wall
The Armies at the Buffalo, March 1926 framed on the wall
The Armies at the Buffalo, March 1926 framed on the wall

About this reproduction

  • A reproduction of glass plate negative, Agence Rol, 11 March 1926 — Agence Rol, 1926 — from the copy held by Agence Rol / Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1926 · Wikimedia Commons. The source. The work was published before 1931 and is public-domain verified.
  • Printed faithful to that source scan — restore honestly, disclose always. We do not re-colour it, complete it, or interpret it; the piece you receive is the image as it survives, halftone grain honored as history, not damage.
  • Printed to order on museum-grade cotton-rag stock with pigment inks — the pairing is rated 100+ years.
  • Colour-managed to the source; the tone of the paper and the ink is the period’s, not ours.
  • Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed editions ship flat-packed).
  • If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our pieces cost more than a poster: a poster is a mass run on wood-pulp stock, colour-corrected to whatever flattered the press that day. This is one sheet, pulled for you, at a size where the maker’s hand is visible — the linework, the halftone grain, the lettering — on materials made to outlast their owner.

From the same hand

The Bordeaux Ground, 1908 — glass plate negative, Agence Rol, Agence Rol, 1908

Agence Rol · 1908

The Bordeaux Ground, 1908

The earliest surviving Rol plate of the French game — a provincial ground before the crowds arrived.

Everything starts on a field with a rope round it.
Lisbon and Barcelona in Paris, Boxing Day 1920 — glass plate negative, Agence Rol, 26 December 1920, Agence Rol, 1920

Agence Rol · 1920

Lisbon and Barcelona in Paris, Boxing Day 1920

A Portuguese club against a Catalan one, in France, two days after Christmas — the game already stateless.

The rules travelled faster than anything else Britain exported.
An English Club in Paris, May 1921 — glass plate negative, Agence Rol, 15 May 1921, Agence Rol, 1921

Agence Rol · 1921

An English Club in Paris, May 1921

A London side lines up at the Bergeyre — the missionary fixture, photographed at last.

Football was taught by demonstration, on tour, in the spring.