Two Breton women in a meadow

Émile Bernard's Two Breton Women in a Meadow (1886) is among his earliest experiments with the bold simplification that would culminate in Synthetism. Bernard had not yet fully developed the cloisonné technique he pioneered in 1888, but this 1886 work already shows him moving toward the flat areas of color, simplified outlines, and decorative arrangement that would define his mature style. The Breton women provided the same opportunity they offered Gauguin — folk costume with its geometric simplicity, the meadow's flat green offering an abstract ground against which simplified figures could assert their pattern-like forms.

The 1886 painting shows Bernard in transition — still connected to Impressionist broken color but moving toward larger, more decisively bounded areas of tone. The Breton costume, with its distinctive black dress and white coiffe, provides geometric clarity that resists atmospheric blending. The meadow green is handled in broader, less fragmented strokes than pure Impressionism would require. The figures are frontal and simplified, anticipating the fully developed Synthetist approach of 1887-88.