Pont-Aven School (French:École de Pont-Aven;Breton:Skol Pont Aven) encompasses works of art influenced by the Breton town ofPont-Aven and its surroundings. Originally the term applied to works created in the artists' colony at Pont-Aven, which started to emerge in the 1850s and lasted until the beginning of the 20th century. Many of the artists were inspired by the works ofPaul Gauguin, who spent extended periods in the area in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Their work is frequently characterised by the bold use of pure colour and theirSymbolist choice of subject matter.
Pont-Aven is acommune of theFinistèredépartement, inBrittany, France, some distance inland from where the riverAven meets the Atlantic Ocean. From the 1850s painters began to frequent the village of Pont-Aven, wanting to spend their summers away from the city, on a low budget in a picturesque place not yet spoilt by tourism. Gauguin first worked in Pont-Aven in 1886.[1] When he returned in 1888, the situation had changed: Pont-Aven was already crowded, and Gauguin looked for an alternative place to work which he found, in 1889, inLe Pouldu (today part of the community ofClohars-Carnoët), some miles off to the East at the mouth of the riverLaïta, traditionally the border of theMorbihan département. There, Gauguin, accompanied byMeijer de Haan,Charles Filiger and for a while bySérusier, spent the winter of 1889/1890 and several months afterwards.[2]
The opening of the railway line from Paris toQuimper in 1862 encouraged tourism in Brittany. The first group of artists to arrive in Pont-Aven during the summer of 1866 consisted of art students from Philadelphia includingHenry Bacon,[3]Robert Wylie,C. J. Way,Earl Shinn andHoward Roberts. They were soon joined by three other Americans,Benjamin Champney,Frederick Bridgeman and Moses Wright, by two English painters, Lewis and Carraway, and by two Frenchmen. Over the next 15 years, the reputation of the colony spread far and wide, attracting many other painters.Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the leading FrenchAcademic painters, encouraged his American students to go there, while French landscape artists such asWilliam Bouguereau,Louis-Nicolas Cabat andPaul Sébillot also spent summers in the village. Among the other foreigners to visit wereHerman van den Anker from the Netherlands,Augustus Burke from Ireland andPaul Peel from Canada.[4] The English illustratorRandolph Caldecott visited in 1880. He illustrated Henry Blackburn'sBreton Folk: An Artistic Tour of Brittany (1880), one of the most popular guide-books of the time. His naive illustrations caught the imagination of theavant-garde visiting artists and Gauguin in particular, who is known to have imitated Caldecott's style in his drawings his first summer at Pont-Aven.[5][6]
There were three hotels ready to accommodate visitors: the Hôtel de Voyageurs, the Hôtel du Lion d'Or and thePension Gloanec. The Pension Gloanec, where Gauguin and his circle lodged, was especially cheap. When Blackburn visited it offereddemi-pension, i.e. board, breakfast and evening meal with cider thrown in, for just sixty francs a month.[8] The artists were attracted by the beauty of the surrounding countryside and the low cost of living. Many of them were looking for a new point of departure, hoping to break away from theAcademic style of theÉcole des Beaux-Arts and fromImpressionism which was beginning to decline. Brittany opened up new horizons with its language, traditional dress, fervent Catholic belief, an oral tradition and the ubiquitous presence of granite crosses and churches.[9]
The two most innovative painters to arrive on the scene were Paul Gauguin andÉmile Bernard. Gauguin had reached in Pont-Aven in July 1886 while Bernard came later in the summer.[1] When the two met again two years later, they consolidated their relationship.[10] Bernard showed Gauguin hisPardon à Pont-Aven (1888), which some believe inspired Gauguin to paint hisVision après le sermon, Bernard claiming he was the first to adopt the approach, which became known asSynthetism.[11][12] Other artists who stayed with Gauguin, first at the Pension Gloanec in Pont-Aven and later at the Buvette de la Plage in Le Pouldu, wereCharles Filiger,Meijer de Haan,Charles Laval,Robert Bevan,Roderic O'Conor,Émile Schuffenecker,Armand Séguin andWładysław Ślewiński. After his first voyage to Tahiti in 1891, Gauguin returned to Pont-Aven for the last time in 1894, once again staying with his circle of friends at the Pension Gloanec.[13][14]
The style developed in Pont-Aven by Gauguin and Bernard was known as Synthetism as it was designed to synthetise or combine images, producing a new result which was quite different from Impressionism. It relied on a number of principles including the abandonment of faithful representation, the creation of a work based on the artist's memory of the subject but reflecting his feelings while painting, bold application of pure colour, the absence of perspective and shading, the application ofCloisonnism's flat forms separated by dark contours, and geometrical composition free of any unnecessary detail and trimmings.[15]
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Arranged by year of arrival:
