Moisson au bord de la mer

Emile Bernard

Moisson au bord de la mer

en 1891

huile sur toile

H. 73,3 ; Fifty. 92,five cm.

vendu à Vollard en 1905; acquis en 1982

© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

Emile Bernard (1868 - 1941)

Between1886 and 1893, Emile Bernard regularly took his family unit on holiday to Saint-Briac, a small-scale Breton hamlet between the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel and the Bay of Saint-Brieuc. He showtime met Gauguin there in 1886, but it wasn't until 1888 that the two artists met up at Pont-Aven, where they shared their inquiry into the radical simplification of shapes, into abandoning traditional perspective, and using flat areas of colour outlined past night contours recalling the leadwork of stained glass.
During his stays in Brittany, Bernard turned towards the day-to-day tasks of the peasants, similar those of the harvesters in this painting, already celebrated by Millet. The landscapes, haystacks, houses, and men are given a broad treatment by eliminating details in order to retain just the coloured shapes that punctuate the canvas. The dazzler of the gestures and of the landscape seem to illustrate the description of Brittany expressed by the English writer Henry Blackburn in his book Artistic Travels published in 1892: "Nowhere in France are there effectively peasants; nowhere practice nosotros see such dignity of aspect in field labour, such nobility of features amongst men and women reaping and carrying their small-scale harvest of corn and rye, oats and buckwheat". Here, nosotros are immediately reminded of the painters of pastoral scenes: Jules Breton, Millet, Troyon and Rosa Bonheur".
In the spring of 1891, Emile Bernard fell out with Gauguin, accusing him of taking all the credit for the new aesthetic for himself. He moved closer to Cézanne, as seen in this very powerful and geometric painting, with its "rough humanity" every bit the critic Gustave Geffroy declared at the Salon des Indépendants in 1892.

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