In 1889, Paul Gauguin returned to Brittany and spent much of his time at Le Pouldu, a coastal village even more remote than Pont-Aven. There he created this dizzying panoramic view of the rugged Atlantic shoreline. With bold pairings of near and far, steep and at, Gauguin merged distant beaches and craggy cliffs into a nearly abstract surface pattern of brilliant color. His image, however, for all its disorienting space and dazzling palette, does resemble the actual site. Period photographs show that the waves at upper left do meet the beach in a series of broad arcs, and Gauguin wrote that the wet sands of Le Pouldu looked rose, not yellow. The canvas is a powerful application of the Pont-Aven School approach called Synthetism, which calls for a synthesis of the artist's response to nature and sense of design.
At the right edge of the composition Gauguin has included a narrow path and a Breton boy and girl. The girl leans against the wall with her scythe, apparently taking a rest from cutting wheat in the adjacent field, represented by the flat area of golden color in the lower right corner. Her companion plays a flute-like Breton instrument called the flageolet, another reminder of Gauguin's attachment to the harmonies of life in Brittany.
Do not paint too much from nature. Art is an abstraction; let yourself dream in front of nature and extract from it, and think more of the creation that will result.
-Paul Gauguin, 1888
