Description
The Gate – the same wooden gate was painted the same year by a second painter
A wide wooden gate of pale palings rises from the right across the lower part of the canvas. Behind it a grassy bank climbs steeply, with pigs grazing on it. At the right edge stands a woman in Breton dress with a white cap, and beside her a reddish fence. Above are the thatched roofs of low houses and a dense crown of leaves that closes off the sky. The colours are earthen: green, brick, brown. At the lower left a signature with a year is painted into the grass. The work is held by the Kunsthaus Zürich under inventory number 1981/0002; it was painted in 1889.
Paul Sérusier painted the same gate
The museum record carries a fact that does not leave this canvas on its own: the same wooden lattice gate was painted in the same year, 1889, by Paul Sérusier as well, and his picture now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The scene was therefore not chosen by chance; two painters stopped in the same Breton village in front of the same object. The record adds that it was in that very year that Sérusier founded the Symbolist group of artists known as the Nabis.
Where the scene was painted
The record names the place as well: the Breton fishing village of Le Pouldu, not far from Pont-Aven. This is the country in which the painter spent part of the late eighteen-eighties, and a series of canvases came out of it with the same low horizon and the same steep banks.
The gate stands across the whole width
The wooden structure is not an incidental object but the largest thing on the canvas: it runs diagonally from the lower right corner towards the middle and closes off the viewer’s way into the scene. What lies behind it we see only above it. That is why the painting reads as a look from behind an edge rather than as an open view.
The museum lists other titles too
Beside the main title the record lists several others under which the work is known, among them a German one and an older one naming the woman who keeps the animals. All of them describe the same canvas. This is not a contradiction but the ordinary condition of works that have changed languages and collections over more than a hundred years.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every painting here is made by hand in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. In this motif the palings of the gate are the hardest part: they have to stay straight and light without becoming white lines, or they come away from the bank behind them. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished work for approval. Nothing on these pages is printed; the colour is mixed and laid on again for each canvas.
- Subject: a wooden gate before a grassy bank, with pigs and a woman in Breton dress.
- Technique: oil on canvas, earthen green and brick red.
- Sizes: portrait format, from 40 x 50 cm to 160 x 200 cm; 72 x 90 cm and 87 x 110 cm are often chosen.
- Of note: the same gate was painted in 1889 by Paul Sérusier as well.
From the same Breton period, see also Landscape in Le Pouldu, Houses in Le Pouldu and A Farm in Brittany. The museum record gives the measurement as height by width: 92.5 x 73 cm.
