The ferry ride across the Aven River in Brittany was one of the timeless daily rituals of peasant life that Emile Bernard remembered in the prints he created after a summer with Paul Gauguin in that isolated, rocky, and windswept corner of France. In the summer of 1888, the two progressive and ambitious painters had come to the budding artists' colony of Pont-Aven to discover a new, basic vocabulary of color and design in those primitive surroundings. There, they decided to translate their discoveries into prints in the hopes, Gauguin wrote, of making themselves known.
Bernard and Gauguin went their separate ways for several months. When they met again in Paris in January 1889, they felt a desirable interval had elapsed between their Pont-Aven experience and its artistic expression. Time, they theorized, erased from memory all but the most salient lines, forms, and colors that truly defined the rhythms of life and land. Bernard and Gauguin set down these strong impressions with lithographic crayon on zinc plates and had the resulting zincographs professionally printed. Bernard hand-painted each impression with flat washes of watercolor, illuminating them like the medieval stained-glass windows that so inspired him.
Bernard and Gauguin presented their prints in May 1889 at the inaugural exhibition of the painters of Pont-Aven at the Café Volpini on the grounds of the Paris World's Fair, but their hopes for critical notice and public sales remained, for the moment, unfulfilled.
Little by little, I became a man of the Middle Ages; I loved only Brittany.
-Emile Bernard
