Breton Fishermen

Paul Gauguin's 'Breton Fishermen' (1888) is from his crucial Pont-Aven period of 1888 — the year he developed Synthetism/Cloisonnism alongside Émile Bernard and produced his most radical formal innovations before his departure for Tahiti. The Breton fishermen as subjects gave him access to the tradition of peasant labor subjects within the more adventurous formal vocabulary he was developing — the working men of the Breton coast depicted through simplified form and expressive color rather than through the naturalistic observation of Realist marine genre.

Gauguin renders the Breton fishermen with his 1888 Synthetist vocabulary — the figures' forms simplified and outlined, the colors organized for expressive effect rather than naturalistic accuracy. The sea or harbor setting is handled with his characteristic bold simplification. His treatment of the figures' relationship to the sea and to each other creates the compositional organization of a painter moving decisively beyond conventional genre and toward the expressive figuration of his mature style.