Young Breton Woman with a Vermillion Pot and a Kneeling Little Girl, 1892
Late 19th century French painter Paul Sérusier was a pioneering colourist, whose paintings broke free from the realism of the French Impressionists into the realms of the mystical, symbolic, and imaginary. He sought ways of communicating his innermost feelings through his colourful art, writing in his notebook, “Free form and colour from their traditional descriptive functions in order to express personal emotions and spiritual truths.” Warm shades of brown and burnt sienna like Caramel Linen often made their way into his paintings, conveying scorched earth, autumnal bracken, or glowing interiors lit by French sunlight.
Sérusier was born in Paris and trained as an artist at the Academie Julian, the experimental alternative to the more academic Ecole des Beaux Arts. As a student he spent time amongst the artist colony in Pont Aven, where he came into contact with Symbolist painters including Paul Gauguin and Pierre Bonnard. Through contact with these artists, he gradually moved beyond directly representational painting into imaginary interpretations of the world, with heightened colours painted in broad areas of flat paint.
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From here, Sérusier founded the art group known as ‘Les Nabis’, a term taken from the Hebrew word meaning ‘prophet’, acting as a nod towards his desire for making art with deeply spiritual properties, achieved through the interplay of ambient light and colour. He famously said, “Art is a means of communication between souls.”
In the quiet, contemplative painting Young Breton Woman with a Vermillion Pot and a Kneeling Little Girl, 1892, we see the ways Sérusier balanced vivid hues with subdued tones to create vibrating colour sensations in the viewer’s eye. Two young women are situated within a shaded area of landscape – one standing, one kneeling – on the warm, golden-brown earth that seems baked in with the heat of a summer’s day. Around them ambient greens and blues in muted hues are rendered in broad, flat areas of colour, simplifying the scene into a thoughtful, dream-like reverie.
Bretons in the Landscape, 1919
Made some years later, The Times, 1919 is looser and more expressive, with paint applied in scattered, dappled marks to convey the dry, bristling texture of an autumnal landscape. Caramel and honey browns run in rivulets to form a meandering pathway in the near distance, and a group of ominous figures dressed in black amble up its steep slope. Beyond them, a cluster of young women run through the wild undergrowth with arms flailing, like lost souls searching for their way in amongst the wilderness.
Bretons in the Landscape, 1919 takes a similar approach, with scattered marks of colour layered over one another to form the sensations of depth, movement and space. In the foreground, the artist creates the rough, bushy texture of dry undergrowth with warm hues of burnt sienna scattered with tiny, flickering yellow dots, interspersed with searing streaks of turquoise blue that form tall trees emerging from its depths.
Still Life with a Bouquet of Flowers, 1924
In the later painting Still Life with a Bouquet of Flowers, 1924, Sérusier take us into a warm, sunlit interior, rendered in a more realistic style, where a simple still life arrangement features intimate domestic objects arranged into an informal grouping. A rich shade of warm caramel brown colours the entire background wall, setting a scene of comforting ease and tranquillity, a fittingly calm backdrop onto which the juicier shades of burnt orange, lime green, brown, dark turquoise and yellow spill out across its surface. As always with Sérusier’s art, these seemingly humble objects are merely a starting point, from which he can launch forth into the exploration of colour’s most transformative, emotionally resonant properties.
