Young boy from Brittany

Paul Gauguin's 'Young Boy from Brittany' (1889) belongs to his post-Vision-after-the-Sermon period — the year following his radical formal breakthrough and the traumatic collaboration with Van Gogh in Arles, Gauguin had returned to Brittany and continued his investigation of the Breton world that had inspired his most important stylistic developments. His Breton boy subjects were among his most sympathetically direct figure works, the children's unself-consciousness and physical directness reflecting the quality of unspoiled, premodern experience he sought in Brittany before finding it more completely in Polynesia.

Gauguin renders the Breton boy with his mature Synthetist vocabulary — the figure's form simplified and outlined, the color organized for expressive effect rather than naturalistic description. His handling of the boy's face maintains the psychological directness he valued in his Breton subjects, the specific individual within the Cloisonnist formal language neither lost nor overwhelmed by the stylistic treatment. The composition's economy reflects his developed formal confidence.