Farm in Brittany

Around 1890 Brittany was crowded with painters. They came for a countryside they described as older and unchanged, with its own language and its own religious processions, out at the far western end of France, and they gathered at Pont-Aven and at the coastal hamlet of Le Pouldu. Sérusier was 26 and working in the orbit of the older Paul Gauguin.

What he does with this farmstead is easy to see. The buildings, the ground and the sky go down as flat patches of strong colour inside flowing outlines. He was not trying to record how the place actually looked, and the museum describes the picture as typical of his Breton work.

The Van Gogh Museum owned no Sérusier at all until it bought this one in 2016 for its collection of Van Gogh's contemporaries. Sérusier admired Van Gogh's painting, and in 1892 he made a haymaker in homage to him.