Street in Pont-Aven

By the summer of 1886 the Breton village of Pont-Aven had been taking in painters for about 20 years, and the Pension Gloanec rented them rooms cheaply. Gauguin spent that summer there. So did Émile Bernard, 18 years old and walking around Brittany with a paintbox. This street view is dated to that year, and for decades it was catalogued as Bernard's. The Van Gogh Museum now records the maker as unknown and lists Bernard only as the former attribution. The canvas has a documented life all the same. It belonged to the Hungarian painter József Rippl-Rónai in Paris, probably until around 1900, came up at a Lucerne auction in 1972, and was bought there by Bengt and Elin Ekström of Uppsala. They handed it to the museum in Amsterdam in 1989, and the canvas, 43 by 60 centimetres, has been part of the Van Gogh Museum's collection since 1994.