A Breton village and a younger painter with theories

In the summer of 1888, in a small village called Pont-Aven (pohn-ta-VEN) in Brittany, a Celtic-rooted region in the far northwest of France with its own old language and costume, a cheap, scenic place where painters gathered because the living was cheap and the local women still wore traditional dress, Paul Gauguin (1848 to 1903) was at work and out of patience with Impressionism. The Impressionists had taught everyone to chase the look of light on real things. Gauguin wanted to paint the opposite: not what the eye sees out a window, but what goes on behind it, memory, feeling, belief, the inside of a head.

He had help arriving at it. That summer the much younger painter Émile Bernard (1868 to 1941) turned up at Pont-Aven carrying theories aimed squarely at overturning Impressionism, and out of their arguments came a method called Synthetism, of which Vision after the Sermon is generally called the first complete statement. The credit for it would become a lifelong sore point. Bernard had been developing the flat, hard-outlined manner before that summer, and he spent the rest of his life insisting the breakthrough had been his; most accounts grant him the prior claim, even as it was Gauguin’s paintings that became the famous examples and Gauguin’s name the method got attached to.

Synthetism means roughly what it sounds like: instead of copying nature, you synthesize, you boil the scene down and fuse three things into one image, the thing you are looking at, the feeling it gives you, and pure flat decorative shape. The rules that came with it were blunt. Stop trying to reproduce the world faithfully. Build from memory and emotion. Lay down bold, flat areas of pure color. Drop perspective and the careful modeling of light and shade.

The look that carried all that has its own name: Cloisonnism. Picture cloisonné enamelwork, the old craft where thin metal strips are bent into little compartments and each compartment is filled with a single color of glassy enamel, so the finished object is a mosaic of flat colors held apart by hard metal lines. Or picture a stained-glass window, flat panes of pure color with dark lead between them. Cloisonnism is painting done that way: flat areas of unmixed color, each one bounded by a firm dark outline, with the outlines doing the work that shadow and shading do in ordinary painting. Bernard had been working in exactly this manner, drawing it partly from Japanese prints and partly from medieval glass and enamel, and it is the direct spur for the picture you are about to look at.