Landscape from Pont-Aven, Brittany
1888
Oil on canvas, 90.5 x 71 cm

Gauguin was attracted to the untainted rural life of Brittany. Both the distinct granite landscapes and the Breton peasants found their way into his paintings. Left relatively untouched by industrialisation and the modernisation of the French economy, the Bretons pursued a life imbued with Celtic tradition, profound Catholicism, and an apparent primitivism demonstrated in their language, traditions, superstitions and national costume. Gauguin saw Brittany as a perfect place in which to escape from the strains of modern life and society. In a letter of c. September 1888, he describes the marvellous sound of the wooden clogs on granite ground, to him a deep timbre which resonated of the place and its history.
On the surface, "Landscape near Pont-Aven, Brittany" presents a view of the village and its rural surroundings as the backdrop to a shepherd who is adjusting his clogs at the lower right of the composition, watched by a curious calf. On a more complex level, the adoption of perspectival recessional points, separated by the diagonal line of bank and trees, both harks back to the split composition of Gauguin?s Rouen landscapes of 1885 and presages the dramatic negation of naturalism achieved later in the summer of 1888 in a painting such as "Vision after the Sermon" (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh).
Gauguin returned to Brittany in January 1888, after his sojourn in Panama and Martinique. He was already familiar with Pont-Aven, the village seen through the trees in the background of this work, having stayed there initially from June to October 1886.
TB-M

Location: Room 65