Landscape with Two Breton Women

On 23 February 1891 Gauguin put his paintings up for sale at the Hôtel Drouot, the Paris auction rooms, to pay for his passage to Tahiti. This canvas went for 280 francs, and it was bought by a small crowd. Ker-Xavier Roussel, Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier, young painters who called themselves the Nabis, pooled the money with a few friends to help him, and agreed that the picture would move from one of them to the next for fixed spells. The arrangement soon became unworkable, and by 1905 Vuillard had ended up as its only owner. What they were passing around was a scene from Brittany, painted in 1889. Two Breton women sit in the shade of a thin tree in a blazing field. The one who seems to be praying is actually eating, a piece of fruit in her left hand and a knife in her right, and her companion is sliced off by the edge of the canvas, the way a Japanese print or a picture by Degas crops a figure. When Vuillard died in 1940 the painting passed to his nephew Jacques, who was also Roussel's son.