Bord de mer en Bretagne, Saint-Briac

Émile Bernard's Bord de mer en Bretagne, Saint-Briac (Breton Seashore, Saint-Briac, 1888) was painted at the Breton resort of Saint-Briac-sur-Mer — a village between Dinard and Saint-Malo that was a gathering point for progressive artists in the 1880s, visited by Whistler, Sargent, and members of the Pont-Aven circle. Bernard's seashore subject at Saint-Briac provides an opportunity to observe his Synthetist approach applied to a pure landscape rather than figure subject — the formal simplification of coastal forms into color areas and outlines without the humanist content of his Breton peasant subjects.

Bernard applies his developing Synthetist language to the seashore subject: the coastal forms — sea, rock, cliff, sand — simplified into bold color areas bounded by decisive outlines. His palette for the Breton coast is characteristically cool — the blue-grey of the Atlantic, the ochre-brown of Breton rock, the pale sand — applied in the flat, decisive areas that defined his approach. The cloisonniste technique creates a semi-abstract quality appropriate to the landscape's fundamental geometric simplicity.