Praying Breton girl / Young christian girl

Praying Breton Girl (Young Christian Girl, 1894) at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown was painted during Gauguin's brief return to Brittany following his first Tahitian stay — the visit that ended in June 1894 after he broke his leg in a brawl at Concarneau. The praying girl belongs to his sustained interest in religious devotion as a form of spiritual authenticity: the Breton women's Catholic faith, practiced with an intensity that secular Paris had lost, was for him one of the primary markers of the pre-modern culture he sought in Brittany as he sought animist spirituality in Polynesia. The girl's bowed head, clasped hands, and absorbed devotion are rendered without irony or condescension — Gauguin's admiration for sincere religious experience, regardless of its specific doctrinal content, was genuine and persistent throughout his career. The Clark Art Institute, which holds this canvas alongside an extraordinary collection of Renoirs and other Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, provides one of the finest small-museum contexts for European modernism in the United States.

The figure is simplified and flattened in Gauguin's Synthetist manner, the dark Breton cap and dress creating strong value contrast with the pale praying hands. Bold outlines contain simplified color areas. The composition is frontal and concentrated, all attention focused on the act of prayer.