Date: 1892

Dimensions: Overall: 32 3/8 x 45 3/4 in. (82.25 x 116.205 cm)

Medium: Oil on cardboard

Credit Line: Dallas Museum of Art, The Art Museum League Fund

Additional Information: Working with Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven, in Brittany, in the late 1880s, Émile Bernard developed the Synthetist style, which emphasizes decorative forms and surface harmony. Descriptive details are suppressed in favor of broad areas of intensely saturated color and sinuous outlines. In “Breton Women at Prayer,” the field on which the women have gathered is a plane of bright green. The yellow areas have no descriptive function but rather introduce a sinuous art nouveau-inspired pattern. The praying women, too, are reduced to schematic mounds of white and blue-black, the colors of their traditional bonnets and dresses. Similarly, trees in the background are rendered as masses of green-blue, punctuated by the cigarlike shapes of three ochre yellow cedars and the left and right. More distant hills, depicted in uncompromising red, do not recede in space but rise up steeply parallel to the surface of the canvas. These compositional devices, especially the lack of spatial illusionism and the emphasis on flat decorative patterns, were surely influenced by the aesthetic principles of Japanese printmaking which were so admired in France during the nineteenth century. Similarly, medieval stained glass was an inspiration for the broad color areas and distinct outlines that characterize Bernard’s so-called cloisonism of the late 1880s. The Pont-Aven artists turned away from the realist tradition of Western art and instead embraced more “primitive” art forms and styles. Indeed, the profound attraction of the remote villages of Brittany for Bernard, Gauguin, and their friends, was their less civilized and therefore unspoiled and spiritually authentic culture. “Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection,” page 114

Object Number: 1963.34