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Lot Essay
Jean-Yves Rolland will include this work in his forthcoming Moret catalogue raisonné.
The workers of the fields are a theme that returns regularly in the work of Moret during these crowning years of the artist’s association with Ecole de Pont Avent. In Le battage du blé au village the picturesque detail is discarded. Instead, in this vital painting, worthy of the most famous paintings of the Pont-Aven school, the Battage becomes a pretext for decorative invention and a return to synthesism. The figures are reduced to combinations of colored elements and the superimposing flat fields of pure colour become the subject. The simplification of the figures testifies to the artist’s interest in the decorative treatment of the forms according to the synthetic spirit and is nowhere more reminiscent than here of the concurrent work of Paul Serusier. The application of vertical brushstrokes throughout contributes to this desire to ‘build’ and not just to express what is felt, but respect for proportion and the presence of the sky remain traditional, and the painter alternates between planes of colour and animated touches such as the stone walls and the red poppies that spring forth from the bright grassy verges.
In 1894, the same year he painted Le battage du blé au village, Moret had moved from Pouldo to Doëlan. He was invited by Władysław Slewinski to a banquet in honour of Gauguin, who Moret had met and become friendly with as far back as 1888, joining him with Filiger, Seguin and Meyer de Haan at the inn of Marie Henry in Pouldu a year later. Soon after painting the present work, Moret gained further recognition for his art and entered into a contract with Durand-Ruel, who began to buy a large part of his production allowing the artist, together with his great friend Maxime Maufra, to continue his indefatigable exploration of the wild Breton coastline.
The workers of the fields are a theme that returns regularly in the work of Moret during these crowning years of the artist’s association with Ecole de Pont Avent. In Le battage du blé au village the picturesque detail is discarded. Instead, in this vital painting, worthy of the most famous paintings of the Pont-Aven school, the Battage becomes a pretext for decorative invention and a return to synthesism. The figures are reduced to combinations of colored elements and the superimposing flat fields of pure colour become the subject. The simplification of the figures testifies to the artist’s interest in the decorative treatment of the forms according to the synthetic spirit and is nowhere more reminiscent than here of the concurrent work of Paul Serusier. The application of vertical brushstrokes throughout contributes to this desire to ‘build’ and not just to express what is felt, but respect for proportion and the presence of the sky remain traditional, and the painter alternates between planes of colour and animated touches such as the stone walls and the red poppies that spring forth from the bright grassy verges.
In 1894, the same year he painted Le battage du blé au village, Moret had moved from Pouldo to Doëlan. He was invited by Władysław Slewinski to a banquet in honour of Gauguin, who Moret had met and become friendly with as far back as 1888, joining him with Filiger, Seguin and Meyer de Haan at the inn of Marie Henry in Pouldu a year later. Soon after painting the present work, Moret gained further recognition for his art and entered into a contract with Durand-Ruel, who began to buy a large part of his production allowing the artist, together with his great friend Maxime Maufra, to continue his indefatigable exploration of the wild Breton coastline.