The Flageolet Player on the Cliff

Two years after Martinique, in 1889, Gauguin was back in Brittany, in the remote coastal village of Le Pouldu, where he and a small circle of painters worked out an approach they called Synthetism, flattening a scene into bold outlines and blocks of colour rather than copying every detail. On a narrow clifftop path a Breton boy plays a flageolet, a small local flute, while a girl stands by holding a scythe, the yellow patch below her the wheat she has come to cut. The high tilted ground and the way the sea sits like a wall behind them owe something to the Japanese prints Gauguin admired. It hangs in Indianapolis, part of a large group of Pont-Aven works the museum acquired in 1998.