The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘I find a certain wildness here’
As a new Gauguin show opens, Nick Trend visits the Breton town where the artist sought simplicity
In the autumn of 1888, Paul Gauguin and a young Parisian artist, Paul Sérusier, headed off to the Bois d’Amour – the Woods of Love – just outside Pont-Aven. This wasn’t a romantic stroll, it was an artistic quest. Sérusier had asked Gauguin for a painting lesson and it resulted in one of the most famous moments in art history.
You can still find the spot where they set up an easel. It’s a short walk out of town, past the back gardens of the village houses and a little way up the river among the beech trees. You may even be lucky at this time of year and glimpse the silver backs and flickering fins of salmon swimming up to their spawning grounds.
But it was the effect of reflected sunlight, the moving shadows of the trees on the water, and the deep colours of the turning leaves that had a profound effect on the two artists. They stopped a little short of a watermill and, under Gauguin’s direction, Sérusier produced an extraordinary sketch. It is an almost abstract composition of brilliant yellows, oranges and mauves, yet it brilliantly captures the view of the bend in the river, the reflection of the trees on the water and the mill in the distance.
Gauguin had told Sérusier to react instinctively, to express his emotions but simplify what he saw, to paint with strong colours in clear “fields” – the younger artist responded decisively. It was only intended as a sketch but when Sérusier took it back to Paris and showed it to his fellow students – including Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis – they were so blown away they dubbed it their “Talisman”. It galvanised a generation of expressionist painters – the Nabi.
Gauguin showed little interest, however. His talisman was Pont-Aven itself, its people and its landscapes. The summer of 1888 was his second visit to what was a much cheaper, more offbeat alternative to the smart resorts of the Normandy coast frequented by the impressionists. In fact, Pont-Aven was already host to a small colony of expat American painters, but Gauguin didn’t get on with them and his statue now in the centre of the town captures something of his haughty arrogance.
He had come to this port town a few miles up a wooded estuary in a quest for a simpler life. “I love Brittany,” he remarked. “I find a certain wildness and primitiveness here. When my clogs resound on this granite soil, I hear the dull, matt, powerful tone I seek in my painting.” He wasn’t the only artist to look for a wilder, more primitive alternative to Normandy. In 1886, Monet stayed in glorious isolation on Belle-Ile a few miles off the coast, where he became obsessed with capturing images of the sea surging around its rocky shore.
Gauguin’s idea of the primitive was less radical. Pont-Aven is now, and I’m sure was then, an incredibly attractive place. Clusters of stone houses gather along the river Aven as it splits and gushes through deep channels worn into the granite bedrock before tumbling down a geological fault line into the narrow saltwater estuary.
These channels form natural millstreams and in Gauguin’s time there were 14 working watermills, grinding the celebrated blé noir (black wheat), which is still used for making the local pancakes, and the biscuits for which the town is famous. In PontAven today, the watermills no longer operate, but the old buildings on the natural islands and streams have been converted into houses and restaurants. Indeed, far from wildness, Pont-Aven now offers mostly peace and quiet and a profusion of chocolatiers, biscuit shops, jam makers and cafés.
Gauguin found his inspiration in the nearby coastal landscapes, the churches and the Bois d’Amour. But he also painted the people, and was especially fascinated by the local costume. A new exhibition at the National Gallery, which opens on Monday, includes some of the more important portraits from his time here.
But Gauguin was also fascinated by the female form unencumbered by clothing. In Pont-Aven, he made regular efforts to find locals who would model nude, but during the years he spent in Brittany he found only one who would oblige. And she insisted on keeping her hat on.