Portrait of my sister Madeleine

Émile Bernard's 'Portrait of my Sister Madeleine' (1888) depicts his younger sister who was also connected to the Pont-Aven circle — Madeleine Bernard was admired by both Gauguin and others in the Symbolist milieu, and Émile's portraits of her gave pictorial form to a figure who was a presence within the artistic community he inhabited. His portrait of his sister in 1888 was painted at the peak of his Cloisonnist development, and the work demonstrates how he applied his formal innovations to the intimate subject of family portraiture.

Bernard renders his sister with his 1888 Cloisonnist vocabulary — the face and figure simplified through outline and flat color areas, the portrait's formal language departing from conventional naturalistic portraiture in the direction of his Synthetist experiments. The intimate subject gives the formal experimentation a personal warmth, the Cloisonnist treatment applied to the well-known face creating the specific quality of his most personal work. His handling of the portrait's formal elements within his radical style shows the breadth of Cloisonnism's application.