Lollichon Field and Pont-Aven Church

Lollichon Field and Pont-Aven Church, painted in 1886 during Gauguin's first Pont-Aven stay, shows the landscape of the Breton village that would become central to his artistic development. The Pont-Aven church — a Romanesque structure central to the village's religious and social life — appears in the background, framing the open field in the foreground. In 1886 Gauguin was still working in a relatively Impressionist manner, his later Synthetist innovations still developing; this early Brittany painting has more naturalistic color than his 1888 canvases. The church's presence signals the Breton Catholic piety that Gauguin found both picturesque and significant as a counterpoint to Parisian secularism.

Oil on canvas with a relatively naturalistic palette appropriate to 1886, before Gauguin's full stylistic transformation. The field's greens are observed rather than symbolically intensified, the church rendered with architectural specificity, and the composition organized along conventional landscape principles of foreground, middle distance, and sky.