Brittany Landscape

Émile Bernard's 'Brittany Landscape' (1888) is one of his Cloisonnist Breton subjects — the fully developed style of bold outline and flat color that he and Gauguin jointly developed at Pont-Aven in 1888 applied to the distinctive visual character of the Breton countryside. Bernard's Brittany landscapes of 1888 show the Cloisonnist method at its most rigorously applied — the landscape's forms reduced to flat areas of simplified color bounded by dark outline, creating a visual language closer to stained glass or Japanese prints than to conventional plein air painting.

Bernard renders the Breton landscape with his fully developed Cloisonnist vocabulary — the fields, sky, and landscape elements organized as flat color areas separated by bold dark outlines. The technique eliminates conventional modeling and atmospheric recession in favor of an expressive flatness that emphasizes the decorative quality of the landscape's forms. His color is simplified toward intensity rather than naturalistic accuracy, the Breton landscape's greens and blues and browns asserted with bold directness.