Henry Moret French, 1856-1913

Paysage à la Chaumière Bretonne, as its title indicates, captures the breezy, light openness of the countryside in Brittany, complete with a bucolic cottage sitting on acres of rolling farmland. Hay bales sit outside its front door, as if to beckon the viewer down the path that leads inside. Moret has chosen a palette of vivid greens, oranges, light pinks, and ochres, imbuing the work with an Autumnal feel. Moret resided and worked in Brittany alongside Gauguin and the Pont-Aven artists, and throughout his career, he rarely left the region. In 1889 he had stayed at Marie Poupée's Inn in Le Pouldu along with Gauguin, who had a great influence on his work. Coastal views where the dominant theme of his work beginning in 1890 when he worked in the Lorient area. In 1895 he signed an agreement with distinguished art dealer Durand-Ruel, which freed him from financial worries. That same year Gauguin left Pont Aven. These events signaled a change in Moret's style and within the Impressionistic realm his canvases shifted toward the new theories of the Synthetist movement. Moret rarely restrained himself with color or limited himself to a tonal palette. Light played a role in his work but usually as to how much it intensified his color use. After his death in 1913, Durand-Ruel wrote "…he occupies a unique place in the evolution of art at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, as has been able to fuse together two fundamentally opposing styles: the Synthetism of Pont-Aven and Impressionism"