Pont-Aven is associated with agreeable memories. This village in the South of Finistère draws men and women from all over Europe, summer after summer. Many of them stay there throughout the winter, content to be shut off from the world, allowing the sweet and gentle lassitude of the place to lull their cares and troubles. Is it climatic—this soothing influence—or is it the outcome of a spell woven over beautiful Pont-Aven by some good-natured fairy long ago? I have often wondered. Certain it is that intelligent men, many of them painters, have been content to spend years in Pont-Aven. Some time ago Mother and Father, touring in Brittany, came to this delightful spot, and determined to spend three weeks there. They stayed three years.
All my life I have heard stories of this wonderful place, and of their first visit. It was when my father had only just begun his career as a painter. The experience, he says, was a great education. There he found himself in an amazing nest of French and American painters, all the newer lights of the French school. He was free to work at whatever he liked, yet with unlimited chances of widening, by daily argument, his knowledge of technical problems. For the three years that he remained on this battlefield of creeds conflicts of opinion raged constantly. Everyone was frantically devoted to one or another of the dominating principles of the moderns. There was a bevy of schools there.
One, called the Stripists, painted in stripes, with vivid colour as nearly prismatic as possible, all the scenery around. Then, there were the Dottists, who painted in a series of dots. There were also the Spottists—a sect of the Dottists, whose differentiation was too subtle to be understood. Men there were who had a theory that you must ruin your digestion before you could paint a masterpiece. No physically healthy person, they declared, could hope to do fine work. They used to try to bring about indigestion.
One man, celebrated for his painting of pure saints with blue dresses, over which Paris would go crazy, never attempted to paint a saint until he had drunk three glasses of absinthe and bathed his face in ether. Another decided that he was going to have, in Paris, an exhibition of merry-go-rounds which should startle France. He had a theory that the only way to get at the soul of a thing was to paint when drunk. He maintained that the merry-go-rounds whirled faster then. One day my father went to his studio. He was dazed. He did not know whether he was standing on his head or his heels. It was impossible to see 'Black Bess' or any of the pet horses he knew so well. The pictures were one giddy whirl.
Then, there was the Bitumen school, a group of artists who never painted anything but white sunlit houses with bitumen shadows. A year or two afterwards a terrible thing invariably happened. Without any warning whatsoever, the pictures would suddenly slide from off their canvases to the floor. The bitumen had melted.
The Primitives afforded joy. Their distinctive mark was a walking-stick, carved by a New Zealand Maori, which they carried about with them. It gave them inspiration. So powerful was the influence of these sticks that even the head of a Breton peasant assumed the rugged aspect of the primitive carvings in their paintings. The most enthusiastic disciple of the sect was a youth who was continually receiving marvellous inspirations. Once, after having shut himself up for three days, he appeared looking haggard and ravenous. Without a word, he sat down heavily near a table, called for absinthe, and, groaning, dropped his head in his hands, and murmured, 'Ah, me! Ah, me!' All beholders were in a fever to know what the mystery was. After some minutes of dead silence the young man rose majestically from his chair, stretched forth one arm, and, with a far-away look in his eyes, said, 'Friends, last night, when you were all asleep, a beautiful creature came to me in spirit form, and taught me the secret of drawing; and I drew this.' Then he brought out a picture. It was far above his usual style, and the more credulous envied his good fortune. Some weeks afterwards, however, it was discovered by a painter with detective instincts that the marvellous vision was in reality a chambre au clair—that is to say, a prism through which objects are reflected on paper, enabling one to trace them with great facility.
IN AN AUBERGE, PONT-AVEN
Such are the extraordinary people among whom Mother and Father found themselves on their first visit to Pont-Aven—geniuses some of them, mere daubers others, all of them strange and rough and weird. More like wild beasts they looked than human beings, Mother told me; for very few women came to Pont-Aven in the early days, and those were Bohemians. The artists allowed their hair and beards to grow long. Day after day they wore the same old paint-stained suits of corduroys, battered wide-brimmed hats, loose flannel shirts, and coarse wooden sabots stuffed with straw.