From 1886 onwards, Gauguin was attracted to Brittany, a relatively remote, hilly peninsula on the Atlantic coast of northwestern France. The Breton people, with their distinct Celtic roots and close relationship to the land and sea, were considered in tuned with their rugged environment. When Gauguin moved to the town of Pont-Aven halfway through the year, he felt as if he had ‘travelled back across centuries’. He remarked:
I like Brittany. Here I find a savage, primitive quality. When my wooden shoes echo on this granite ground, I hear the dull, muted, powerful sound I am looking for in painting.
Escaping the pace and expense of modern, industrial Paris, Gauguin visited Brittany five times between 1886 and 1894, and played a central role in the artistic community that converged there. On his second trip to Pont-Aven, Gauguin met the younger painter Emilie Bernard. Gauguin’s paintings The swineherd of 1888 and The red cow of 1889, though their abstraction, stylised figures and blocks of pure colour, show the impact of consecutive summers working alongside Bernard. It was a period of rapid stylistic development for both artists and Bernard later commented that ‘Our work was, at this time, made almost in common.’
The swineherd positions a Breton man and two bright yellow pigs in front of a weathered slab of granite, overlooking Pont-Aven. The work highlights Gauguin’s fascination with the simplicity of agrarian society, as well as his focus on the stylisation of form and colour. Short, vertical brushstrokes give a tapestry-like quality to the patchwork of fields, trees and flowers surrounding the white-washed houses and church steeple of the town. Exemplifying Gauguin’s process of painting a landscape from life and then adding details from his ‘dossier’, the figure of the man, wearing traditional wooden shoes, or sabots, was sourced from his sketchbooks. In fact, a very similar figure appears in his 1888 painting Landscape of Brittany.
