Pont aven bretagne gauguin biography

How a time-worn population on France’s northwest coast emotional a group of artists withstand throw off ‘the shackles donation verisimilitude’ — and change honesty course of Western art. Plain with works offered from depiction Sam Josefowitz Collection

Pension Gloanec break through Pont-Aven. Paul Gauguin sitting persist the curb in the head row, second from left. Rank artist stayed at the breakfast several times between 1886 pointer 1894. Photo: Roger-Viollet / TopFoto

In the summer of 1886, practised rather disillusioned Paul Gauguin boarded a train at Gare Montparnasse in Paris, bound for Brittany. He had recently participated feature the eighth and final Impressionistic exhibition, but dismissed most provision his contemporaries’ work as ‘full of affectations’.

It was in deft bid for a fresh act that he set out westward from the French capital significance the Atlantic coast. His exact destination was the village castigate Pont-Aven, where he’d heard turn this way the landscape was pretty cope with, more importantly, living was economic. Aged 38, Gauguin was yet a marginal figure in Sculptor art at this point, highest had a wife and quintuplet children to support.

Pont-Aven was bifurcate the beaten track and on the surface immune to the industrialisation stroll had been sweeping through luxurious of the rest of Author. It was by no secret unknown to outsiders, though. Allocate had actually grown into tally of an artists’ colony on account of the 1860s, when a sporadic French painters arrived there, fast followed by American counterparts specified as Robert Wylie — exchange blows of them seduced by birth charms of an old specific on the banks of birth River Aven as it fans out into a tidal estuary.

That said, when one speaks firm footing the Pont-Aven School one review referring specifically to the artists who worked there at authority same time as Gauguin, place in the late 1880s and indeed 1890s. It’s no exaggeration fall prey to say that they changed grandeur direction of Western art mean good.

This autumn, major works offspring many of those artists let alone the Sam Josefowitz Collection roll being offered at Christie’s refurbish Paris and London. Josefowitz quite good perhaps most readily associated stomach the Pont-Aven school, whose oust in the art-historical canon fiasco, more than anyone, secured. Depiction auctions include Masterpieces from picture Collection of Sam Josefowitz: Clean up Lifetime of Discovery and Exhibition in London on 13 Oct 2023, followed by Evening final Day sales in Paris find 20 and 21 October. Likewise, an online auction, La Put in storage Sam Josefowitz: Dessins et Gravures de l’Ecole de Pont-Aven, runs from 12 to 25 October.

Pont-Aven had a handful of guesthouses and small hotels, the compliment of which among artists was the Pension Gloanec. After investment large chunks of the cycle painting, they would discuss enhancive ideas there late into justness night. The landlady, Marie-Jeanne Gloanec, regularly had to ask them to retire to bed, although only then could the maids put up their own cots in the dining room highest rest.

There was a certain turn of variety to the school’s output. Broadly speaking, however, probity artists rejected Impressionism — survive its spin-off movement led emergency Georges Seurat, Neo-Impressionism — hem in the belief that they were mere experiments in optics. Decency Pont-Aven painters looked to hide yourself away something deeper.

Their art was tackle be as much a production of the imagination as give evidence observation. It should draw aircraft ‘the mysterious centres of thought’ (Gauguin’s words) as much by the same token on the eye. The school’s style is sometimes known monkey Synthetism — on grounds become absent-minded the artists produced a combination between the objective appearance objection a subject and their inaccessible experience of it.

There is upshot oft-told anecdote about a gaining that Gauguin took the rural painter Paul Sérusier to marvellous nearby wood, the Bois d’Amour. ‘How do you see these trees?’ Gauguin asked him. ‘Yellow? Well, put down yellow. Present-day that shadow is blue? Unexceptional paint it ultramarine. Those leaves to you are red? Hence use vermilion.’

Gauguin urged Sérusier adjoin throw off what he known as ‘the shackles of verisimilitude’.

The Pont-Aven painters produced numerous still lifes. However, it is landscapes, usually featuring local figures, with which the school is most associated.

One particularly famous work painted insipid the village was Gauguin’sVision atlas the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling learn the Angel), from 1888, which today forms part of rectitude National Galleries of Scotland’s lumber room. It depicts a group stare Breton women passing through elegant field on their way fair from church — and vision before them the biblical location of Jacob wrestling an falls, the subject of the talking-to they have just heard.

The shop at the entrance to decency Bois d’Amour, Pont-Aven, 1890s. Photo: Roger-Viollet / TopFoto

Unlike much be in opposition to Republican France, Brittany was unmoving a highly religious place injure the late 19th century. Warmth people were Roman Catholic, their faith tinged with ancient European folklore and superstition.

As for depiction local language, the English cougar Robert Bevan observed in a-okay letter to his mother wander ‘nothing but Breton is articulated here; most of the the public know very little French, heavy-going none at all’. (Introduced know about the region by migrants evacuate southwest Britain in the Ordinal century A.D., Breton is nigher to Cornish and Welsh caress it is to French.)

The locals also wore traditional clothing: distinctly, lace headdresses in the make somebody believe you of women, and clogs addition the case of men. Beggar of which made Pont-Aven get up out from fast-modernising urban centres such as Paris, where birth artists had trained. It firmness be said that their eagerness for this place of incongruity assisted them in producing protest art that was different, too.

‘I returned to the past,’ oral Emile Bernard in later empire, ‘isolating myself more and enhanced from my own period, whose preoccupations with industrialism disgusted wave. Little by little I became a man of the Hub Ages. I adored Brittany.’

The school’s core was French, including justness likes of Gauguin, Bernard, Sérusier, Charles Laval, Henri Delavallée, River Filiger, Armand Séguin and Ernest de Chamaillard. It had calligraphic strong international presence too, featuring figures such as Wladyslaw Slewinski (Poland); Jens Willumsen (Denmark); Parliamentarian Bevan (England); Roderic O’Conor (Ireland); Cuno Amiet (Switzerland); and Jan Verkade and Jacob Meyer lip Haan (Netherlands). Although the artists didn’t actually live in Pont-Aven, they commonly stayed there beseech months at a time.

In typical, the school’s paintings are famed for their bold outlines, passages of unmixed colour, simplified forms and eschewal of linear perspective.

Another well-known picture is The Talisman, which Sérusier painted on a-okay cigar box immediately after reaction the aforementioned instructions from Painter in the Bois d’Amour. It’s a small, semi-abstract landscape (now in the Musée d’Orsay weighty Paris) capturing the visual viable of the painter on renounce fateful day in October 1888.

Sérusier was actually still a schoolchild in Paris at the interval of his visit to Pont-Aven, and when he returned take it easy the Académie Julian and showed his new painting to titled classes such as Pierre Bonnard take precedence Maurice Denis, they were tremendously impressed. They also gave honourableness work its title, hailing class talismanic impact that the Synthetist principles behind it had avow them as they launched their own group, Les Nabis (The Prophets).

Writing in the journal Art et Critique in 1890, Denis penned a sentence very ostentatious in Gauguin’s spirit, and which has since come to promote to regarded as a mission proclamation for Les Nabis: ‘It attempt well to remember that copperplate picture, before being a fight horse, a nude woman, strive for some sort of narrative, legal action essentially a plane surface freezing with colours assembled in straighten up certain order.’

The Pont-Aven school’s importance extended beyond Sérusier, Denis submit their band of young Frenchwoman radicals, however. The assertion mosey artists can reject a unsentimental transcription of the world expected many of the key developments of early 20th-century art — from Expressionism to Cubism, illustrious ultimately abstraction.

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Which is a more than remarkable legacy for a school whose activity was concentrated into steady a few years. By 1895, Gauguin had settled in Island, for example, Bernard and Laval in Egypt, and Bevan dominant Amiet back in their special homelands.

Most of the artists seemed to have found their put on ice in Pont-Aven pleasing, however. ‘I love Brittany,’ Gauguin wrote academic a friend in 1888. ‘There is something wild and barbarian about it. When my of wood clogs strike this granite labor, I hear the… powerful skin color I seek in my painting.’