Paysannes bretonnes

Paysannes Bretonnes (Breton Peasant Women), painted in 1894 and now in the Musée d'Orsay, belongs to the body of Brittany work Gauguin produced during his French sojourn between his two Tahitian periods. After his first return from Polynesia in 1893, Gauguin spent time in Brittany revisiting the landscape and people that had first inspired his Synthetist revolution. The Breton peasant women of 1894 are painted with the full stylistic maturity he had developed: strong outlines, flat color zones, simplified forms, and the symbolic use of color that his time in Tahiti had intensified. The Musée d'Orsay holds the core collection of French Post-Impressionism, making it the primary home for understanding Gauguin's development.

Oil on canvas with Gauguin's full Synthetist vocabulary applied to a familiar Breton subject — the peasant women's costumes providing flat geometric patterns of dark and white, the landscape background reduced to bands of color, the figures' outlines firm and decorative rather than naturalistic.