Conversation in the fields. Pont-Aven

Conversation in the Fields, Pont-Aven, painted in 1888 during Gauguin's transformative stay in Brittany and now in the Fin-de-Siècle Museum in Brussels, depicts two figures in conversation in an open field landscape — one of the informal genre subjects Gauguin observed among the Breton peasantry. Pont-Aven became an artists' colony drawing painters from across Europe who sought in Brittany's rural, Catholic peasant culture an alternative to the modernity of Paris. Gauguin arrived in 1886 and 1888, using the experience to develop the symbolic, non-naturalistic approach — later called Synthetism or Cloisonnism — that would define his mature work. Conversations and gatherings in the Breton landscape gave him material to explore color as symbolic rather than descriptive.

Oil on canvas with the flat, enclosed color areas and strong contour lines Gauguin was developing at Pont-Aven in 1888 under the influence of medieval stained glass and Japanese prints. The figures and field are divided into simplified color zones, the green of the grass bold and unmodulated, the figures' forms outlined rather than modeled through chiaroscuro.