Breton boys bathing

Breton Boys Bathing, painted in 1888 and now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, shows young Breton males swimming or wading in an outdoor setting — a subject that allowed Gauguin to combine his interest in the primitivist authenticity he sought in Brittany with the tradition of the outdoor male nude. The bathers subject connected to the broader Impressionist and Post-Impressionist interest in modern outdoor leisure, pursued differently by Cézanne's monumental Bathers series and Seurat's La Grande Jatte. For Gauguin, the Breton boys embodied the uncorrupted rural life he was seeking as an antidote to Parisian civilization. The Hamburger Kunsthalle holds one of Germany's finest collections of nineteenth and twentieth-century art.

Oil on canvas with Gauguin's 1888 Synthetist approach applied to outdoor figures — the boys' forms simplified and outlined, the water's surface rendered in broad flat areas rather than Impressionist light-play, the whole composition aspiring to the decorative boldness he associated with non-Western art.