The House at Pen-Du

By 1890 the painters gathered around Paul Gauguin on the coast of southern Brittany were outlining flat areas of colour with firm contours, a manner a Paris critic had named cloisonnism, after the partitioned enamels called cloisonné. This small gouache on cardboard is Filiger's version of it. The fields are flat patches of green, rust and pink, each ringed with a thin blue line, and the house of the title stands among them as a plain block with two chimneys and dark red windows, with pale water and a far shore behind. Faint pencil lines still cross the whole surface, a squaring grid of the kind used to copy a design at another size. On the back is a study of three adolescents. The Musée d'Orsay bought the piece at auction in Brest in July 2026, for 207,900 euros including fees.