1889, Paul Sérusier, The Three-Pond Cottage at Le Pouldu -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label:
Sérusier was part of a small circle of young artists who formed around Gauguin at Pont-Aven in the late 1880s. During this apprenticeship, Sérusier explored means of transposing the distinctive features of the Brittany countryside onto his canvases. He also began making outdoor sketches before returning to his studio to experiment with applying unmodulated colors to create bold contours and symbolic resonances, a method that became a lifelong practice.
During one of his outdoor work sessions, Sérusier discovered a picturesque cottage in the village of Le Pouldu. The limited chromatic variety of the low stone walls, the golden wheat fields and haystacks, and the muddied ponds provided an ideal iconography for the artist's innovative approach to landscape painting. The overall effect of this experiment was nothing less than the total sublimation of the observed locale into a scene inhabited by a spiritual presence, a mystical vision rendered onto the canvas in a bold harmonization of color and form.
The Three-Pond Cottage at Le Pouldu is a masterpiece of Post-Impressionist painting and was one of the works that acted as a catalyst for the Nabi movement. This ambitious large-scale composition perfectly illustrates the essential nature of Gauguin's influence on an entire generation of avant-garde painters while highlighting Sérusier's importance as a conduit of that influence
1889, Paul Sérusier, The Three-Pond Cottage at Le Pouldu -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label:
Sérusier was part of a small circle of young artists who formed around Gauguin at Pont-Aven in the late 1880s. During this apprenticeship, Sérusier explored means of transposing the distinctive features of the Brittany countryside onto his canvases. He also began making outdoor sketches before returning to his studio to experiment with applying unmodulated colors to create bold contours and symbolic resonances, a method that became a lifelong practice.
During one of his outdoor work sessions, Sérusier discovered a picturesque cottage in the village of Le Pouldu. The limited chromatic variety of the low stone walls, the golden wheat fields and haystacks, and the muddied ponds provided an ideal iconography for the artist's innovative approach to landscape painting. The overall effect of this experiment was nothing less than the total sublimation of the observed locale into a scene inhabited by a spiritual presence, a mystical vision rendered onto the canvas in a bold harmonization of color and form.
The Three-Pond Cottage at Le Pouldu is a masterpiece of Post-Impressionist painting and was one of the works that acted as a catalyst for the Nabi movement. This ambitious large-scale composition perfectly illustrates the essential nature of Gauguin's influence on an entire generation of avant-garde painters while highlighting Sérusier's importance as a conduit of that influence