Paul Gauguin
(France 1848–1903)
- Title
- Breton women at a fence
- Alternative title:
- Bretonnes à la barrière
- Year
- 1889
- Media category
- Materials used
- lithograph
- Edition
- Guerin 4, from the first edition of c.50 impressions
- Dimensions
-
17 x 21.5 cm 48.0 x 63.0cm sheet
- Signature & date
- Signed l.l. sheet, pencil "P Gauguin". Not dated.
- Credit
- Purchased 1976
- Accession number
- 298.1976
- Location
- Not on display
- Further information
Gauguin's quest for the primitive pre-ceded his ill-fated trips to Martinique and Tahiti. As a follower of Pissarro and Cezanne in his Paris years, as a colleague of van Gogh in Arles soon after, and then as co-instigator with Emile Bernard of the Pont-Aven School, he perfected a primitivising technique that could be applied equally to a Breton pastoral or a Polynesian nude. This print - one of a group of ten zincographs on distinctive yellow paper known collectively as the 'Volpini suite' - depicts two women in the regional dress of Brittany. Their characteristic wimples animate innumerable compositions of the period by this and other artists. Though a novice to the lithographic medium, Gauguin proved instantly a master. In this plate the unpredictable undulations of line and Japoniste abbreviations of form are disruptive, preventing an easy assimilation by the eye. No single element is represented whole. Instead, the image is constructed from peek-a-boo fragments that cohere through opposition rather than accord. The farmyard subject is effectively lost in the process.
Art Gallery Handbook, 1999.
- Bibliography (5)
-
Terence Maloon (Australia) (Author), Paths to Abstraction 1867-1917, Sydney, 2010, 149 (illus.).
Bruce James (Australia) (Author), Edmund Capon (England; Australia, b.1940) (Director), Art Gallery of New South Wales handbook, Domain, 1999, 83 (illus.).
Renée Free (Australia) (Author), Forest and field: from Claude to the Barbizon School, Domain, 1995, 8.
Renée Free (Australia) (Author), Fin de Siècle, Sydney, Jan 1994.
Ewen McDonald (Australia) (Editor), The Art Gallery of New South Wales collections, Sydney, 1994, 140 (colour illus.).
- Exhibition history (3)
-
Fin de Siècle: posters prints drawings from the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 15 Jan 1994–13 Mar 1994.
Forest and field: from Claude to the Barbizon School, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 14 Jul 1995–17 Sep 1995.
Paths to Abstraction 1867 to 1917, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 26 Jun 2010–19 Sep 2010.
