Two Breton Women in a Meadow

In April 1886 Bernard was thrown out of Fernand Cormon's teaching studio in Paris, and he spent the following six months walking through Normandy and Brittany. That walk is how he reached Pont-Aven, a village on the river Aven where board was cheap and painters shared the same inn table. This panel was made there, before he went back to Paris in October. He was 18.

It catches him mid-experiment. Through 1886 he was working in the small separate touches of colour the neo-impressionists were using in Paris, and the flat shapes inside dark contours that later made his name were still ahead of him.

The reason a Bernard hangs in the Van Gogh Museum at all is Andries Bonger, a Dutchman working in Paris who was Theo van Gogh's brother-in-law and who wanted the most complete Bernard collection he could assemble. He bought this one from the painter before 1903, and it stayed with his family until the museum acquired it from his heirs in November 1992.