Breton Women in the Meadow - Émile Bernard
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Description
A 1888 Post-Impressionist work by Émile Bernard, featuring Breton women in a meadow rendered through the flat, bold forms of Cloisonnism.
Émile Bernard painted Breton Women in the Meadow in 1888, a period during which he worked closely with Paul Gauguin in Pont-Aven. This work displays the characteristics of Cloisonnism, a style defined by flat areas of colour separated by dark, heavy outlines. The composition rejects traditional perspective, opting instead for a decorative arrangement that flattens the pictorial space.
The scene depicts a group of women in traditional Breton attire, gathered in a field. Bernard uses a stark, acidic yellow for the grass, which creates a sharp contrast against the dark, sombre tones of the women's clothing and their pale blue head-dresses. The figures are arranged in a manner that suggests a rhythmic, almost patterned repetition, rather than a naturalistic gathering. The lack of depth and the emphasis on bold, simplified forms reflect the influence of Japanese woodblock prints, which were a significant interest for artists of the period.
Bernard was a young man when he produced this work, yet he was already experimenting with the rejection of Impressionist light and shadow in favour of symbolic, synthetic forms. The focus remains on the graphic quality of the shapes and the interplay of colour blocks. The figures, with their simplified facial features and rigid postures, contribute to the overall decorative effect of the canvas. This approach moved away from the observation of nature toward a more subjective, constructed image. The work remains a clear example of the stylistic shifts occurring in late 19th-century French painting, where artists sought new ways to represent form through abstraction and colour theory.
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Each print is produced to order using 12-colour giclée printing on FSC-certified archival paper. Designed in Britain and printed at your nearest production hub to reduce waste and speed up delivery.
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Museum-grade giclée on FSC-certified archival matte paper, with framed and canvas options.
- Paper sizes: A4, A3, A2, A1, A0 and B2 (50×70 cm)
- Canvas: XS (20×30 cm) to Large (60×90 cm)
- Frames: black, natural wood, dark wood or white
Breton Women in the Meadow - Émile Bernard
Artist Biography
Emile Bernard
He was raised by his grandmother, who owned a laundry in Lille, because his younger sister was ill and required his parents' full attention. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris but was expelled for insubordination. At the Academie Cormon he met Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh; his friendship with Van Gogh produced some of the most important letters in art history.
Bernard and Gauguin fell out definitively in 1891 over the paternity of Symbolism and cloisonnism. Bernard believed he had been written out of the story, which he had. He spent years writing criticism and art history to set the record straight, producing first-hand accounts of the period that remain primary sources.
His later work turned conservative. He travelled to Egypt, studied the Old Masters, and repudiated the avant-garde experiments of his youth. The early paintings, made between 1886 and 1897 when he was barely out of his teens, are the ones that matter. He was brilliant too young and spent the rest of his career looking backwards. His correspondence with Van Gogh, preserved and published, is one of the most direct records of how two young painters in the 1880s thought about colour, composition and what painting was for.
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