Houses in Le Pouldu

By 1890 Gauguin had traded the artists' crowd at Pont-Aven for something quieter down the coast, Le Pouldu, a scatter of houses above the Breton shore, where he lodged at a small inn run by a young woman named Marie Henry. He was nearly broke and already dreaming of somewhere much further from Paris than Brittany could ever be. You can feel that restlessness in how the place is painted. The distance is almost gone; roofs, trees, a path and a few figures in local dress are pressed into one flat weave of colour, laid down in short parallel strokes. What he wanted was a simpler, older way of living than the summer visitors came to see, the same hunger that would put him on a boat to Tahiti the following year. The Breton costumes here are part of that search, a sign of a life he imagined untouched.