Vue de Locquirec

"Vue de Locquirec" (View of Locquirec) of 1902, held at the Kunsthaus Zürich, depicts the Breton coastal village of Locquirec, in Finistère on the north coast of Brittany. Brittany was a favoured destination for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French painters — Gauguin had famously worked at Pont-Aven, and many artists sought the region's rugged landscapes, traditional culture, and sharp Atlantic light. Vallotton's Locquirec landscape belongs to a series of coastal and landscape paintings made on summer working trips outside Paris. His approach to Brittany is characteristically non-romantic: the village or coastal view is depicted with the same formal economy he brought to Alpine subjects and Normandy landscapes, without the mystical or primitivist overlay that attracted Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School. The Kunsthaus Zürich, which holds a major group of his works, preserves this canvas as part of its comprehensive survey of his landscape production.

Oil on canvas with smooth handling. The coastal setting's characteristic qualities — the particular quality of Atlantic light, the relationship between sea, land, and sky — are resolved through Vallotton's flat tonal planes rather than atmospheric Impressionist handling. The village architecture, if included, provides geometric elements that anchor the natural setting.