Brittany Landscape

Brittany Landscape (1888) at the National Gallery of Art is a paradigmatic example of Gauguin's mature Synthetist approach to the Breton countryside. He and Émile Bernard had been working together at Pont-Aven through the summer of 1888, and this canvas shows the formal system they had developed — bold color zones bounded by firm contours, spatial depth achieved through color relationships rather than aerial perspective, the Breton landscape rendered as a system of formal relationships rather than an atmospheric observation — in one of its most fully realized applications. The Nabis painters who would emerge from Gauguin's example in the early 1890s — Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard — were to take the principles visible in this landscape into the decorative paintings, prints, and theater designs of a whole subsequent generation. The National Gallery of Art's collection of Gauguins from the Breton period, including this landscape alongside others from the same years, provides an unusually comprehensive view of how Synthetism developed.

Bold colour areas — the deep blue-green of trees, warm ochre of fields, pale sky — are bounded by firm, defining contours that structure the composition with decorative clarity. No atmospheric haze softens the colour transitions. The Breton landscape becomes a pattern of colour masses rather than a naturalistic illusion, pointing directly toward the decorative abstraction of the Nabi painters who followed Gauguin's lead.