Breton Fishermen

Gauguin's Breton Fishermen of 1888 belongs to his crucial Pont-Aven summer — the same productive season that produced The Vision After the Sermon and the development of Cloisonnism with Émile Bernard. The fishermen as subjects brought his peasant labor interest into contact with the maritime world of the Breton coast, and his treatment of working men in the fishing community demonstrated his Synthetist method applied to figures from a different social and economic world than the inland agricultural subjects he more typically painted. The tradition of marine genre painting in French art — from Vernet's dramatic sea scenes through Courbet's Normandy subjects to the Impressionist interest in coastal life — had typically emphasized the drama of sea and weather, with figures as elements within a larger natural spectacle. Gauguin reversed this emphasis: his fishermen are not diminished by the scale of the sea but carry their own psychological weight, their working lives depicted with the same serious attention he gave to his symbolic and visionary subjects. This insistence on the equal dignity of the observed and the imagined was fundamental to his mature artistic philosophy.

Gauguin renders the Breton fishermen with his 1888 Synthetist vocabulary — the figures' forms simplified and outlined, the colors organized for expressive effect rather than naturalistic accuracy. The sea or harbor setting is handled with his characteristic bold simplification. His treatment of the figures' relationship to the sea and to each other creates the compositional organization of a painter moving decisively beyond conventional genre and toward the expressive figuration of his mature style.