Pont-Aven School

Watermill in Pont-Aven by Gauguin

Pont-Aven School (French: École de Pont-Aven) is a term occupied by works of art iconographically due to Pont-Aven and its surroundings. Originally the term was focusing works of the artists' colony emerging there since the 1850s, and some decades later the work of the group of painters gathering around the artist Paul Gauguin in the early 1890s. Their work is characterised by the bold use of pure colour and Symbolist choice of subject matter.

Background

Pont-Aven is a commune of the Finistère département, in Brittany, France, some distance inland from where the River Aven meets the Atlantic Ocean. From the 1850s painters began to frequent 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. 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, in Le Pouldu (today part of the community of Clohars-Carnoët), some miles off to the East at the mouth of the river Laïta, traditionally the border of the Morbihan département. There, Gauguin, accompanied by Meijer de Haan, Filiger and for a while by Sérusier, spent the winter of 1889/1890 and several months afterwards.

Artists working in Pont-Aven (or Le Pouldu)

• Paul Gauguin 1886, 1888, 1889-1890 and 1894
• Emile Bernard 1888 and 1891-1893
• Charles Laval 1888
• Emile Schuffenecker
• Meijer de Haan
• Władysław Ślewiński
• Paul Sérusier 1888, 1889 (and 1889, 1890)
• Armand Séguin
• Charles Filiger
• Jan Verkade
• Mogens Ballin
• Henry Moret
• Ernest Ponthier de Chamaillard
• Gustave Loiseau
• Emile Jourdan
• Jens Ferdinand Willumsen
• Roderic O'Conor
• Maurice Denis
• Robert Polhill Bevan 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893 and 1894
• Franck C. Penfold circa 1880
• Cuno Amiet

Resources

Notes

References

• Cariou, André: Les Peintres de Pont-Aven, Éditions Ouest-France, Rennes 1994 ISBN 2-7373-1499-2
• Jaworska, Wladyslawa: Gauguin et l'Ecole de Pont-Aven, Ides et Calendes, Neuchâtel 1971 (no ISBN); English edition: Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School, Thames and Hudson, London 1972 ISBN 0-500-23169-9; American edition: New York Graphic Society, Greenwich Connecticut 1972 ISBN 0-8212-0438-6
• Bevan, Robert. Robert Bevan 1865-1925. A memoir by his son, Studio Vista, London 1965.

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