Bretons - Emile Bernard
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Description
A 1888 Post-Impressionist work by Emile Bernard, featuring the bold outlines and flat colour planes characteristic of the Cloisonnist style.
Emile Bernard painted Bretons in 1888 during his time in Pont-Aven. This work displays the stylistic shift toward Cloisonnism, a movement Bernard helped develop alongside Paul Gauguin. The technique relies on flat areas of colour separated by dark, heavy outlines, a method inspired by stained glass and Japanese woodblock prints.
The composition is divided into distinct zones. In the foreground, two women wearing traditional Breton headgear occupy the lower portion of the frame. Their forms are simplified, with the artist prioritising bold shapes over anatomical detail. Behind them, a dark, massed area suggests a crowd or a gathering, while the upper section features figures set against a bright, grassy slope. The use of colour is non-naturalistic: the green of the field is intense, and the skin tones of the figures are rendered with greenish hues, reflecting the artist's interest in expressive, rather than descriptive, colour palettes.
Bernard's approach to the Breton subject matter avoids the sentimental or picturesque tropes common in the period. Instead, he focuses on the graphic potential of the scene. The flattened perspective and the lack of traditional modelling create a decorative effect that aligns with the broader goals of the Pont-Aven school. By stripping away unnecessary detail, Bernard directs the viewer's attention to the rhythm of the lines and the interaction of the colour fields. This painting represents a moment of experimentation in late 19th-century French art, where the boundaries between representation and abstraction were being tested. The work remains a clear example of the synthetic style that sought to simplify the visual world into its essential components.
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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
Bretons - Emile 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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