Girl Herding Pigs

Girl Herding Pigs was painted during Gauguin's Breton period, when he was living in Pont-Aven in 1889 and developing the synthetist style he would carry to Martinique and eventually Tahiti. The painting depicts a young Breton girl at work in a rural landscape, rendered with flat planes of color and simplified outlines that reflect his growing rejection of Impressionist naturalism. At the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art in Japan, it represents one of the relatively rare examples of his Breton peasant subjects preserved in an East Asian collection.

Gauguin outlines the figures and terrain with thick, confident contours, filling them with areas of flat local color rather than Impressionist dabs. The composition uses a high horizon line that compresses the landscape into decorative bands, anticipating the spatial conventions he would employ more radically in his Polynesian paintings.