Landscape with Two Breton Women

Landscape with Two Breton Women (1889) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is a mature example of Gauguin's Synthetist treatment of the Breton countryside with figures. By 1889 he had been working in Brittany for several years and his formal approach to the landscape was fully developed: the fields and coastline rendered in bold flat color zones, the Breton women in their distinctive headdresses providing the compositional anchors that connected landscape to human culture. Paul Sérusier, who had come to Pont-Aven specifically to learn from Gauguin in 1888, had returned to Paris with the Talisman — a small panel painted under Gauguin's direct instruction that became the founding document of the Nabi movement. The Nabis would transform Gauguin's Synthetist principles into the decorative painting of the 1890s that influenced everything from theater design to textile patterns. This 1889 landscape thus belongs to the most influential moment of Gauguin's formal development, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's collection of Gauguins from this period is among the most important in America.

The women's dark costumes and white coiffes create strong light-dark contrasts that anchor the composition. The landscape behind is rendered in flat colour zones of green and blue, without atmospheric modulation. The combination of simplified landscape and clearly silhouetted, traditionally dressed figures creates the archetypal image of Breton identity that Gauguin sought to embody in his Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu work.