"On the pear-tree wood, which we regret to see left in monochrome, a naked woman stands out in half relief, her hand to her hair, seated rectangularly in a landscape. This is the only number of sculpture. Nothing in painted wood, in glass-paste, in wax."
Paris with her art-theories had nothing now to teach Gauguin. He must find his own way, create his own tradition. Aloof alike from the theories of the Impressionists and from those of their successors, the Pointillists—theories of the disassociation of tones and of the analytic disintegration of light, based on the scientific treatises of Chevreuil and Helmholtz—he was painfully tending back to the old decorative tradition that a picture must be an unit, the harmonious expression of a single emotion. Hunger proved again the best friend of the independent artist. He fled from Paris and sought refuge in the country.
II
The place of refuge which Gauguin found was the village of Pont-Aven in the district of Finistère in Brittany.
There is no doubt that this chosen spot and its surroundings had upon his art an influence only secondary to that exercised later by Tahiti. Indeed the charm of Tahiti itself was slow to efface this influence.
The Celtic fringe of Europe—Cornwall, the Highlands of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Galicia—presents everywhere a great similarity in natural feature and in the character of its inhabitants. The Celt is an outcast. Driven backward by successive waves of civilization and conquest, he has finally occupied those lands which were so unprofitable to his conquerors that he was able to remain in them undisturbed. Long residence in these desolate places has made of him a natural mystic, a conservative. Perhaps he might never have been anything else had not the nineteenth century—with its railroads and the life-weariness of its cultivated classes—made of him a curiosity. The hordes of tourists, of bad artists, of dealers in journalese, who rave about Brittany, Cornwall, or Ireland as picturesque summer-resorts, show that civilization has obtained its revenge on the savage who prefers to remain a savage.
Paul Gauguin did not assuredly go to Brittany to discover the picturesque. Had he done so his painting would have ranked no higher than the painting of Charles Cottet or of Lucien Simon. His real home as an artist, as he was later to discover, lay elsewhere—under less troubled skies, in the midst of more tropical vegetation. But the gloom, the melancholy inertia, the mystic faith, the simplicity of this land of wind-mills, small trees, granite coasts and menhirs, worked strongly on the yet untamed primitive in him. Stronger still perhaps was the appeal of the sea, the most restless and yet the most changeless element in nature. Gauguin was in appearance, as in manners, a sailor—the eye, the direct curt speech, the reserved disdain, the freedom of manners, all these in him had been accentuated by his early experiences. In Brittany he found the sea; he found an unspoiled people; he found, above all, repose from the everlasting chatter of art-theories that, like the bubbling of endless bottles of too light champagne, frothed eternally in the cafés of Paris. Brittany gave him greater faith in himself; Brittany began to dispel the nineteenth century skepticism that was slowly stifling him.
