Bretons on the Road

Bretons on the Road by Maufra around 1900 depicts figures from the Breton peasant culture that was a central subject for the Post-Aven painters and their successors. Maufra, who had worked at Pont-Aven alongside Gauguin in the early 1890s, retained an interest in the distinctive appearance and culture of the Breton people — their traditional costumes, their rural occupations, their embeddedness in a landscape and culture that seemed to resist modernity. Figures on roads or paths — travelers, pilgrims, market-goers — were a recurring motif in Breton painting of this period. The painting is privately held.

Maufra places the Breton figures within the landscape through his characteristic integration of figure and environment — the same directional, energetic brushwork applies to people and terrain alike. His handling of the figures' traditional costumes — the white coiffes of Breton women — provides the composition's most prominent light passages against the landscape's darker tones.