Conversation in the fields. Pont-Aven

Gauguin spent most of 1888 in Pont-Aven, in Brittany, lodging at the Pension Gloanec and painting the fields around the village. In October he left for Arles to share a house with Van Gogh for nine weeks. This canvas comes from the months before that.

It hangs in Brussels because of Anna Boch. She was a painter herself, the only woman among Les XX, the Belgian group that invited Gauguin to show 12 works in 1889, and in 1890, at their exhibition, she paid 400 francs for Van Gogh's Red Vineyard, the only painting he is known by name to have sold in his lifetime. This Gauguin stayed with her for decades and reached the museum through her bequest in 1937. In the lower left he signed it plainly, P. Gauguin 88.