Beau temps à Pern (Ile d'Ouessant)

Henry Moret was a Breton painter who had studied under Gauguin's influence at Pont-Aven and developed a Post-Impressionist landscape style specifically attuned to the rugged Atlantic coastline of Finistère and the Île d'Ouessant. Beau temps à Pern — fair weather at Pern, a village on the island's southwestern tip — captures the Ouessant landscape in its rare clear-weather aspect, when the normally storm-lashed island shows its sunlit, wind-polished beauty. Ouessant was the westernmost inhabited island of metropolitan France, known for its dramatic weather, isolated community of women who waited for men at sea, and a landscape of extraordinary stark beauty. The Petit Palais acquired this as part of its collection of Post-Impressionist Breton landscape.

Moret uses a relatively bright, divided palette derived from his exposure to Impressionism and the Pont-Aven Post-Impressionists, with the clear-weather sky and sunlit vegetation rendered in pure colors applied in short, energetic strokes. The composition's openness reflects Ouessant's exposed, unwooded character.