The Downpour

In 1893 Japanese prints were still a passion among the young painters around Sérusier in Paris, and he copied them to learn how their makers simplified a scene. What he took from them shows in this wet day at Huelgoat, a small town in inland Brittany where he often stayed. The rain falls in straight grey strokes laid over the whole picture like a pattern, the way Japanese printmakers drew a shower. A young woman in a black dress and white coiffe hurries forward under a big umbrella, head bowed, skirt swinging. Behind her rise tall town houses with shutters and dark roofs, and the square is one flat stretch of pinkish ground with a few grey puddles. Almost every detail has been left out. Farther back, another figure under an umbrella is little more than a dark shape against a white wall.