Collection: Pont-Aven School

The Pont-Aven School covers the painters who gathered around Paul Gauguin in the Breton village of Pont-Aven between 1886 and 1894. The group developed Synthetism and Cloisonnism as alternative programmes to both academic painting and Impressionist plein air practice, flattening space, separating areas of colour with strong outline, and treating the painted surface as a self-contained sign system.

The principal members were Gauguin (visiting in 1886, 1888, 1889–1890, and 1894), Émile Bernard (arriving in 1886), and Paul Sérusier (1888 and 1889–1890). Sérusier's small panel The Talisman, painted in 1888 under Gauguin's instruction, became the canonical document of the school's principles and the founding object of the Nabis circle that took the lessons back to Paris. Charles Laval, Charles Filiger, Meijer de Haan, Henry Moret, Armand Séguin, Roderic O'Conor, Robert Polhill Bevan, Władysław Ślewiński, Jan Verkade, and Mogens Ballin populated the wider field.

The 1889 Volpini Exhibition at the Café des Arts in Paris, mounted alongside the Universal Exposition, gave the school its first public showing.