Jóvenes luchadores

In the summer of 1888 Gauguin was living cheaply in Pont-Aven, in Brittany, and starting to paint in a way that broke with the Impressionists he had come up among. He flattened his colours into broad zones and thickened his outlines, borrowing the look of Japanese woodblock prints. This picture of two Breton boys grappling in a field comes from exactly that moment. In a letter to Vincent van Gogh in July that year he mentioned he had 'just finished a Breton wrestling,' most likely this one. He painted the meadow as a wall of green with almost no depth, so the two small fighters and a bright splash of water sit up flat on the surface, closer to a printed page than a window onto a field.