Landscape with Huntsmen

Around 1889 Bernard was working in Brittany and studying Cézanne, whose canvases he could see in the Paris colour shop of the dealer Julien Tanguy. The even brushwork here and the way the blocks of colour are laid down come out of that study, and the museum's catalogue points to one Cézanne in particular: a road running between trees toward a lake, painted about 1880 and now in the Kröller-Müller Museum at Otterlo. Into a landscape of that ordinary kind Bernard put a boar hunt. The riders are naked, which is why the subject is read as Hercules after the Erymanthian boar, the fourth of his 12 labours. He was under orders to bring the animal back alive.