Girl Herding Pigs

Girl Herding Pigs (1889) at the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art belongs to the group of Breton peasant subjects Gauguin painted during his most intensive Synthetist development at Pont-Aven. The subject — a girl with pigs in a coastal landscape — belongs to the ancient tradition of the pig-herd in pastoral art, but Gauguin's treatment strips away the pastoral idealization in favor of direct observation rendered through his developing flat, simplified style. A girl herding pigs was both a documentary observation of Breton agricultural life and a formal test of how moving animal forms could be rendered within his increasingly flat compositional approach. His engagement with peasant children as subjects in Brittany paralleled his interest in the children he would later observe in Tahiti — both groups representing a kind of natural vitality unspoiled by European bourgeois education. The Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, one of the strong regional Japanese collections of European art, holds this relatively rarely exhibited canvas from his critical Pont-Aven period.

Gauguin outlines the figures and terrain with thick, confident contours, filling them with areas of flat local color rather than Impressionist dabs. The composition uses a high horizon line that compresses the landscape into decorative bands, anticipating the spatial conventions he would employ more radically in his Polynesian paintings.