The Swineherd

The Swineherd (c.1888) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art belongs to the group of Breton animal and figure subjects Gauguin painted during his most intensive Synthetist development at Pont-Aven. A boy herding pigs in a Breton coastal landscape is an ancient subject in Western art — the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son among the swine has given the pig-herd enormous resonance in European culture — though Gauguin's treatment avoids explicit allegorical content. What interested him was the specific formal situation: the dark silhouettes of pigs against the Breton soil, the simplified figure of the herd-boy, the coastal landscape rendered in bold flat color zones. The subject's rootedness in agricultural labor and animal husbandry made it part of his project of finding in Breton rural life the 'primitive' vitality he believed modern European civilization had destroyed. LACMA's holding of this early Synthetist canvas alongside later Polynesian works documents the continuity of that primitivist project across his different geographical settings.

The pigs are rendered as pale, rounded forms against the dark earth and green grass. Simplified colour zones define the landscape without conventional tonal graduation. The pig-herder's figure is integrated into the scene as a small, dark accent. The overall treatment is flatter and more decorative than the Impressionist landscapes of his earlier Breton visits.