National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Turner to Monet: the triumph of landscape

Here in Brittany the peasants have a medieval air about them and do not for a moment look as though they think that Paris exists and it is 1889 Gauguin, letter to Van Gogh, 18891 Haystacks in Brittany is among a small number of works painted by Gauguin in 1890 at Le Pouldu, on the Breton coast. From July 1886 until his departure for Tahiti in March 1891, Gauguin travelled regularly between Paris and towns in Brittany and Provence – the latter the site of his notorious collaboration with Van Gogh – searching for a way to consolidate his style, as well as a place to live cheaply. He stayed at Le Pouldu, some twenty kilometres south-west of Pont-Aven, late in 1889 and during 1890. The works he painted there, images of peasant life, the landscape and harvest scenes, are some of the most radically simplified of his career. Gauguin described how he ‘scrutinised the horizons, seeking that harmony of human life with animal and vegetable life through compositions in which I allowed the great voice of the earth to pl