Paul Gauguin – Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven

Paul Gauguin – Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven – hand-painted oil painting reproduction

Three girls in Breton dress and white coifs hold hands in front of a low stone wall; behind them lie heaps of cut grain and the roofs of the village. The canvas was painted in June 1888 at Pont-Aven, oil on canvas, 73 × 92.7 cm, and is held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington under accession number 1983.1.19 (Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon). Here the dance is made again under the brush: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, oil on canvas, with no printing. The museum records the measurement as height by width.

A gavotte, and that is what he called it

The dance is neither invented nor vaguely “folk”: Gauguin himself called it a gavotte, an old French round dance. It is a small but decisive detail, because it says the scene is not a decorative image of peasant merriment but one specific custom. The figures are deliberately too large for their background – the wall and the sheaves are low and the girls rise above them, so the dance reads as ceremonial and slow rather than boisterous.

Why Pont-Aven at all

Gauguin moved to Brittany in January 1888, and the reason was not romantic: Pont-Aven was cheaper to live in, and at the same time the village kept its own language, dress and customs. He was looking for a place where he could survive on little money and still find something that was not Parisian. It is the same calculation he would repeat in Tahiti, except that this one lay a good walk from the railway.

The painting’s route through a century

The work left the painter’s hands quickly: in November 1888 the Paris firm Boussod, Valadon et Cie. bought it, and in September 1889 sold it on. Later it was with the dealer Ambroise Vollard, in the 1950s with the Scottish collector William A. Cargill, and then bought for Paul Mellon, who gave it to the Washington gallery in 1983. That is an unusually dense chain for a picture painted while Gauguin was still unknown.

A hand-painted reproduction for your home

Above the text are shots of this motif from our workshop. We paint it in eight sizes; 93 × 74 cm is the nearest to the original, while for a wider wall 120 × 100 cm is a frequent choice. The scene is bright and horizontal, so it works well above a chest of drawers or a bed. From the same village and almost the same moment comes The Yellow Christ – the same Brittany, but a sacred scene instead of a village one; In the Waves shows the same coast with a single nude figure, and The Green Christ Breton piety beside the sea.

• Subject: Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven, Paul Gauguin, 1888
• Technique: hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas – never printed
• Original: 92.7 × 73 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, acc. 1983.1.19, Paul Mellon Collection
• Interesting fact: the dance in the painting is a gavotte – that is what Gauguin himself called it