Boy Sitting in the Grass

Bernard was 18 and out of a studio when he painted this. Cormon had expelled him from his Paris atelier early in 1886 for insubordination, his parents wanted him to go into business, and he refused and went walking in Brittany instead. He spent six weeks in Pont-Aven that year, from the middle of August to the end of September, and the boy sitting with his back to us in the grass almost certainly comes from those weeks. The green is laid on wet into wet, with the child's red hair set against it. The canvas carries no signature, unusual for him in that year, and for a long time nobody could say for certain that it was his. The doubt cleared only in 1992, when a charcoal study for the figure turned up in an album of early drawings that Bernard had put together himself.