Breton Women at the Turn

Breton Women at the Turn is one of Gauguin's most important 1888 Cloisonnist figure compositions — women of the Pont-Aven community depicted at a turning point in a road, their relationship to each other and to the landscape organized through his fully developed Synthetist vocabulary. The spatial complexity of figures at a bend in a path — their movement implied rather than shown, their relationship to the receding road creating a multi-directional spatial situation — gave Gauguin's Cloisonnist method a particularly interesting compositional challenge. His treatment of the Breton women's traditional costumes — the white coiffes, the dark skirts, the aprons — within the simplified flat-color framework of Cloisonnism shows how the specificity of observed detail could survive the radical formal transformation of his method. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen holds this canvas, one of the strongest Gauguin holdings in Scandinavia and a testimony to the early Danish collecting engagement with Post-Impressionist work that also manifested in the Danish National Gallery's significant holdings.

Gauguin renders the Breton women with his mature Cloisonnist method — the figures bounded by bold dark outlines, the costumes (particularly the distinctive Breton women's white caps) simplified into areas of flat color, and the road and landscape setting organized through his characteristic formal vocabulary. His treatment of the Breton costumes (with their specific regional character) within the Cloisonnist framework creates the synthesis of documentary observation and formal experimentation that distinguished his best 1888 work.