Landschaft aus der Bretagne

Gauguin painted this in Brittany in the summer of 1889, on his second long stay there, living cheap and working close to the young painter Émile Bernard. Under Bernard's influence he was flattening his pictures, laying down whole fields of a single tone bounded by firm curving contours, a manner that came to be called synthetism. There is little depth here, and that is deliberate. The trees, the fallen trunks and the shoreline are built from the same undulating arcs across a purposely flat surface. What makes this particular canvas matter reaches well beyond France. In 1892 the Swedish painter Richard Bergh bought it and hung it at home, where a generation of Swedish artists came to study it, and it helped set the course of their landscape painting through the 1890s.