Breton boys bathing

Gauguin painted this in Brittany in 1888, at Pont-Aven, where a colony of artists had gathered partly because living was cheap and partly because the region felt older and rougher to them than modern Paris. That was what Gauguin wanted, somewhere he could imagine as untouched, a first rehearsal for the tropics he would sail to a few years later. Boys strip off and splash in the mill stream at the Bois d'Amour, painted in flat, bold patches of colour with dark outlines rather than careful modelling. This was the same year he went south to share a house with Van Gogh in Arles, an experiment that ended after nine weeks with Van Gogh's breakdown.