Little Breton Bather

Gauguin's Little Breton Bather of 1888 belongs to his sustained investigation of the figure in natural settings during his most productive Pont-Aven period. The subject — a Breton child bathing in the rivers of Finistère — combined his interest in unaffected physical life with the traditional nude-in-landscape subject, but in a register quite different from the academic nude. His Breton bathers are neither the classical idealization of the Salon nor the detached observation of Degas's series: they are figures engaged in ordinary life, their nakedness uncontrived, their relationship to the natural world direct and unself-conscious. The 1888 development of Cloisonnism gave him a formal language perfectly suited to such subjects: bold outlines defining the figure against water or landscape, color used to convey the physical reality of the outdoor scene rather than to render academic volumes. The bathing subject would recur throughout his career, from these early Breton figures to the river bathers of his Tahitian period, where the tropical setting allowed him to fully realize the vision of unself-conscious physical life that his Breton work had begun to articulate.

Gauguin renders the bathing child with his Synthetist approach — the figure defined through bold outline and simplified color, the water and setting treated decoratively rather than with Impressionist atmospheric dissolution. The small figure's physical presence is established with confident simplicity, the painting's meaning carried as much by its formal decisions as by its depicted subject.