Landscape at Pont-Aven

The summer this was painted, Paris was full of the Exposition Universelle and the new iron tower on the Champ de Mars. Bernard was 21 and part of that season in a sideways fashion. Shut out of the official art pavilion, in June 1889 he and Paul Gauguin hung their own canvases in a café on the fairground run by a man named Volpini. Then he went back to Brittany. Pont-Aven was a small mill village on a tidal river, and by that year painters were boarding cheaply at the Pension Gloanec by the dozen and working the same valley he paints here. Some of the pictures he showed in Volpini's café were signed Ludovic Nemo, a name he borrowed from Jules Verne's captain.