Paul Gauguin, the Pont-Aven School and the power of ‘wild and primitive’ Brittany

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

It was in a bid for a fresh start that he set out west from the French capital towards the Atlantic coast. His precise destination was the village of Pont-Aven, where he’d heard that the landscape was pretty and, more importantly, living was cheap. Aged 38, Gauguin was still a marginal figure in French art at this point, and had a wife and five children to support.

Pont-Aven was off the beaten track and apparently immune to the industrialisation that had been sweeping through much of the rest of France. It was by no means unknown to outsiders, though. It had actually grown into something of an artists’ colony since the 1860s, when a few French painters arrived there, swiftly followed by American counterparts such as Robert Wylie — all of them seduced by the charms of an old village on the banks of the River Aven as it fans out into a tidal estuary.

That said, when one speaks of the Pont-Aven School one is referring specifically to the artists who worked there at the same time as Gauguin, in the late 1880s and early 1890s. It’s no exaggeration to say that they changed the direction of Western art for good.

This autumn, major works by many of those artists from the Sam Josefowitz Collection are being offered at Christie’s in Paris and London. Josefowitz is perhaps most readily associated with the Pont-Aven school, whose place in the art-historical canon he, more than anyone, secured. The auctions include Masterpieces from the Collection of Sam Josefowitz: A Lifetime of Discovery and Scholarship in London on 13 October 2023, followed by Evening and Day sales in Paris on 20 and 21 October. Additionally, an online auction, La Collection 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 favourite of which among artists was the Pension Gloanec. After spending large chunks of the daytime painting, they would discuss aesthetic ideas there late into the night. The landlady, Marie-Jeanne Gloanec, regularly had to ask them to retire to bed, as only then could the maids put up their own cots in the dining room and rest.

There was a certain amount of variety to the school’s output. Broadly speaking, however, the artists rejected Impressionism — and its spin-off movement led by Georges Seurat, Neo-Impressionism — in the belief that they were mere experiments in optics. The Pont-Aven painters looked to produce something deeper.

Their art was to be as much a product of the imagination as of observation. It should draw on ‘the mysterious centres of thought’ (Gauguin’s words) as much as on the eye. The school’s style is sometimes known as Synthetism — on grounds that the artists produced a synthesis between the objective appearance of a subject and their personal experience of it.

There is an oft-told anecdote about a time that Gauguin took the young painter Paul Sérusier to a nearby wood, the Bois d’Amour. ‘How do you see these trees?’ Gauguin asked him. ‘Yellow? Well, put down yellow. And that shadow is blue? So paint it ultramarine. Those leaves to you are red? Then use vermilion.’

Gauguin urged Sérusier to throw off what he dubbed ‘the shackles of verisimilitude’.

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

One particularly famous work painted in the village was Gauguin’s Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), from 1888, which today forms part of the National Galleries of Scotland’s collection. It depicts a group of Breton women passing through a field on their way home from church — and imagining before them the biblical scene of Jacob wrestling an angel, the subject of the sermon they have just heard.

Unlike much of Republican France, Brittany was still a highly religious place in the late 19th century. Its people were Roman Catholic, their faith tinged with ancient Celtic folklore and superstition.

As for the local language, the English painter Robert Bevan observed in a letter to his mother that ‘nothing but Breton is spoken here; most of the people know very little French, some none at all’. (Introduced to the region by migrants from southwest Britain in the 5th century A.D., Breton is closer to Cornish and Welsh than it is to French.)

The locals also wore traditional clothing: notably, lace headdresses in the case of women, and clogs in the case of men. All of which made Pont-Aven stand out from fast-modernising urban centres such as Paris, where the artists had trained. It might be said that their enthusiasm for this place of difference assisted them in producing an art that was different, too.

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

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

In general, the school’s paintings are renowned 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 cigar box immediately after receiving the aforementioned instructions from Gauguin in the Bois d’Amour. It’s a small, semi-abstract landscape (now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris) capturing the visual sensations of the painter on that fateful day in October 1888.

Sérusier was actually still a student in Paris at the time of his visit to Pont-Aven, and when he returned to the Académie Julian and showed his new painting to peers such as Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis, they were hugely impressed. They also gave the work its title, hailing the talismanic impact that the Synthetist principles behind it had on 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 much in Gauguin’s spirit, and which has since come to be regarded as a mission statement for Les Nabis: ‘It is well to remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some sort of narrative, is essentially a plane surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.’

The Pont-Aven school’s influence extended beyond Sérusier, Denis and their band of young Parisian radicals, however. The assertion that artists can reject a naturalistic transcription of the world anticipated many of the key developments of early 20th-century art — from Expressionism to Cubism, and ultimately abstraction.

Which is a more than impressive legacy for a school whose activity was concentrated into just a few years. By 1895, Gauguin had settled in Tahiti, for example, Bernard and Laval in Egypt, and Bevan and Amiet back in their respective homelands.

Most of the artists seemed to have found their time in Pont-Aven pleasing, however. ‘I love Brittany,’ Gauguin wrote to a friend in 1888. ‘There is something wild and primitive about it. When my wooden clogs strike this granite ground, I hear the… powerful tone I seek in my painting.’