In der Bretagne

By 1886 the painters who had launched Impressionism a dozen years earlier were pulling apart. That spring they held their eighth and final group show in Paris, dominated by a younger man, Georges Seurat, and his tight mosaics of coloured dots. Renoir wanted no part of it. After a trip to Italy he had decided his own feathery brushwork had gone soft, and he was reaching for firmer drawing and cooler colour. He worked through these years in Brittany, on France's rough Atlantic coast, painting figures in the open air. That same summer, further along that coast at Pont-Aven, Paul Gauguin was gathering the young painters who would soon leave Impressionism behind for good.