Vue de Pont-Aven

Émile Bernard's 'Vue de Pont-Aven' (View of Pont-Aven, 1889) is a late Breton subject from the year he left Pont-Aven and his collaboration with Gauguin effectively ended — his view of the town that had been the center of his most important artistic development carrying a retrospective quality, the documentation of the place that had shaped his mature style. The town's combination of stone bridges, mill buildings, and the Aven River had been depicted by dozens of Breton painters, but Bernard's treatment would bear the marks of his fully developed Cloisonnist vocabulary.

Bernard renders the Pont-Aven townscape with his Cloisonnist approach — the buildings, bridges, and river simplified through outline and flat color rather than conventional atmospheric rendering. His treatment of the town's characteristic elements (the stone architecture, the Aven River, the trees) within his formal vocabulary demonstrates the breadth of his method's application beyond his more celebrated figure subjects. The view captures the specific character of Pont-Aven as a subject world.