Brittany Landscape

Painted in 1888 at Pont-Aven during one of his most productive Breton periods, this Brittany landscape shows Gauguin fully engaged with the idea of Brittany as a place of ancient, authentic rural culture. He was consciously seeking in Brittany the primitive vitality he felt was absent from cosmopolitan Paris. The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. holds this work, which exemplifies the developed Synthetist style Gauguin and Émile Bernard were refining at Pont-Aven — a style that would directly influence the Nabis and subsequent generations of modernist painters.

Bold colour areas — the deep blue-green of trees, warm ochre of fields, pale sky — are bounded by firm, defining contours that structure the composition with decorative clarity. No atmospheric haze softens the colour transitions. The Breton landscape becomes a pattern of colour masses rather than a naturalistic illusion, pointing directly toward the decorative abstraction of the Nabi painters who followed Gauguin's lead.