The last of this month’s four summer pictures is Paul Gauguin’s Haymaking, painted in Brittany in 1889, less than a year after the artist’s ill-fated stay in Arles with his temperamental and sporadically violent friend Vincent Van Gogh (an episode touched on in last week’s column). Gauguin was drawn to Brittany, just as he had been drawn to Arles, by the lure of a supposedly simple and rustic existence, far from the corrupting sophistication of life in the city. He wanted, he said, to “imbue himself with the character of the people and the landscape”, and to create an art with the same harsh strength that he associated with Breton life. “When my clogs resound on this granite soil, I hear the dull, matt, powerful tone that I’m after in painting.”

Such was Gauguin’s determination to immerse himself in the world of rural Brittany that even during the months he had to spend in Paris, to promote his work or prepare for exhibitions, he would dress like a farm labourer. Albert Aurier, art critic of the Mercure de France, remembered the painter’s showstopping appearances at the Café Voltaire, favoured haunt of the Symbolist poets Mallarme and Verlaine: “a dark blue beret was permanently on his head, and draped around him he wore a long beige ulster now green with age. This covered a jacket decorated with splashes of paint and a navy blue jersey applique’d with Breton embroidery. His trousers were too long and subsided onto his wooden sabots with a curiously elephantine effect.” Thus dressed, and sipping steadily at his glass of absinthe, Gauguin would deliver himself of strident pronouncements on the parlous state of civilisation. “The West is now in a state of decay,” he would declare with a portentous flourish.

When he went to spend...

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