Bathing Boys at the Watermill in the Bois D'Amour

The Bois d'Amour — the sacred oak grove beside the Aven river at Pont-Aven — was the most mythically charged landscape in the Pont-Aven artists' geography. Gauguin painted bathing boys there in 1886, his first sustained Pont-Aven summer, situating the figure in a natural setting that had accumulated associations with authentic, pre-modern life among the community of painters who repeatedly returned to its shade. The bathing figure in landscape had a distinguished tradition in French art, from Fragonard's fêtes galantes through Seurat's Grande Jatte bathers, and Gauguin's Breton boys bathing by the watermill participated in that tradition while beginning to transform it. His use of broader, simpler color areas than his Impressionist training would have prescribed shows the Synthetist method developing — the water no longer analyzed into optical primaries but treated as a unified color field. This work prefigures the bathing subjects of his Tahitian period, where Polynesian men and women in river and sea settings would allow him to explore the figure in nature with complete formal freedom, liberated from European conventions about the nude and the landscape.

The composition places the bathing figures in a naturalistic river landscape, with Gauguin using broader, simpler areas of color than he employed in his Impressionist phase. The handling shows him moving toward the flatter, more expressive treatment that would characterize his Synthetist work. The palette is rich greens and warm flesh tones.