School of Pont-Aven

In the 1880s, a group of French painters worked in Pont-Aven, a village in Brittany. As early as the 1950s in the nineteenth century, painters settled in the village because of the picturesque setting, away from the big city. Paul Gauguin first visited Pont-Aven in 1886 and became a great inspiration to the painters who came after. At one point, Gauguin felt that Pont-Aven was attracting too many amateurs, so he moved to Le Pouldu, fifteen kilometers away. The work of these painters was inspired by Pont-Aven and its surroundings and it is characterized by a bold use of color, with a symbolist choice of subject. The style that developed in Gauguin's Pont-Aven is known as synthetism, in which several images were combined. As a result, the Pont-Aven School deviated from Impressionism. The Post-Impressionist painting style, cloisonnism, was also used, where bold and flat shapes were separated by dark contours. When Gauguin left for Tahiti, the school lost its foreman.