Août, verger à Pont Aven

Émile Bernard's 'Août, verger à Pont Aven' (August, Orchard at Pont-Aven, 1886) is among his Breton subjects from his early Pont-Aven period — the orchard in summer bearing the fruit that would be harvested as the season turned. Bernard arrived at Pont-Aven before Gauguin and played a more significant role in the development of Cloisonnism than has sometimes been acknowledged — his approach of bold outlines and flat color areas influencing Gauguin as much as Gauguin influenced him. This early orchard subject shows his developing formal ambitions applied to a straightforward Breton landscape subject.

Bernard renders the orchard with the formal clarity he was developing — the simplified forms of trees and fruit organized through his emerging Cloisonnist vocabulary of bold outline and reduced color. The orchard's structure of repeated tree forms within a receding spatial arrangement provided a subject amenable to his formal organization. His treatment shows the transitional quality of his 1886 work: more simplified than conventional plein air painting but not yet fully Cloisonnist.