Washerwomen at Pont-Aven

Washerwomen at Pont-Aven (1886) at the Musée d'Orsay belongs to Gauguin's first extended Pont-Aven period, when he was establishing his relationship with the Breton landscape and its working population. The washerwomen — women doing laundry in the Aven river that ran through Pont-Aven — were one of the most characteristic subjects of the village's artistic community, and multiple painters in the Pont-Aven group depicted them. Gauguin's version from 1886 was painted before his Synthetist breakthrough and reflects his still relatively Impressionist approach at that date — the figures observed in the specific light conditions of the river bank, the activity recorded without symbolic or formal simplification. The comparison of this 1886 washerwoman canvas with the 1888 Arles Washerwomen at MoMA documents the rapid formal development that the Pont-Aven period produced: two years separated two fundamentally different approaches to the same subject type.

Gauguin applied paint in broad, flat areas of strong color bounded by firm contour lines — a technique he called Synthetism, derived partly from medieval stained glass and Japanese prints. His palette is deliberately non-naturalistic, using vivid magentas, ochres.