European and American Art

In the late 1880s Paul Gauguin and the young Émile Bernard worked side by side in the Breton village of Pont-Aven. One of the most rural and old-fashioned regions of France, Brittany had attracted a number of artists looking for a contrast to their own urban culture. Although Gauguin's ultimate importance as an artist was to be far greater, at this point it was apparently Bernard who stimulated him to break with the Impressionism of his earlier paintings. (The question is complicated, because Bernard later backdated some of his own early work to strengthen his claims of priority.)

In any case, this landscape shows how both Bernard and Gauguin reacted against the Impressionist view of the world. Rather than trying to render the exact effect of sunlight on material objects, Bernard believed that artistic success lay "in confronting nature and in simplifying it with the utmost rigor . . . in reducing its lines to eloquent contrasts, its shades to the seven fundamental colors of the prism." Accordingly the painting depicts the landscape as essential shapes in bright, intense colors - the idea of a cloud, a tree trunk or a human face rather than the accidental effects of light and shadow on its surface.

ÉMILE BERNARD
French, 1868 - 1941
Breton Woman and Haystacks
oil on pulpwood board, around 1890
Ackland Fund, 71.29.1