Promenade dans les bois de Châteauneuf

Marrying the influences of Renaissance Italy with the aesthetics of Japanese woodcuts, Paul Sérusier’s Promenade dans les bois de Châteauneuf is a study of rural innocence and timeless tradition. By the mid-1890s, during which the painting was created, Sérusier was spending much time in Brittany, a region he had first visited several years earlier. Artists had long flocked to this western corner of France, drawn to Pont-Aven for its inexpensive rent and picturesque farmlands dappled with chapels, slate-roofed homes, and rolling hills. As John Rewald explained, ‘It was not a particularly varied landscape, yet it had a character of peacefulness to which the almost superstitiously devout Catholicism of the peasants in their picturesque Breton costumes added a touch of medieval mysticism’ (J. Rewald, Post-impressionsm: From Van Gogh to Gauguin, New York, 1978, p. 167).
Promenade dans les bois de Châteauneuf was painted in 1894, just after the artist met Gabriella Zapolska, the Polish actress and celebrated playwright. Theirs was to be a passionate affair, but Zapolska also was an ardent supporter of both Sérusier and his fellow Nabis artists. She particularly appreciated his depiction of Breton customs and the ways in which his paintings responded to what Sérusier believed to be the mysticism of the natural world. Her vibrancy rubbed off on his paintings, and though still fascinated by Brittany, his vision of the region too transformed. Sérusier still painted the Breton peasants at work but, infatuated with Zapolska, his images became brighter, more decorative, the Breton women less melancholic and more otherworldly.
By presenting his protagonists as ethereal, Sérusier brought a sense of theatricality to his compositions, evident in works such as Promenade dans les bois de Châteauneuf wherein the women assemble mage-like through the woods. Dressed in the typical costume of Breton peasants, they gather amongst the slim, leafless trees to commune. Though still employing a relatively simplified palette, here Sérusier’s colours are brighter. Promenade dans les bois de Châteauneuf was a composite image. The artist likely drew on landscapes from both Huelgoat and the forests of Châteauneuf-du-Faou, and, as each region and village had its own style of coiffe, or headdress, Sérusier probably assembled figures from Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu in addition to Huelgoat.
With its graphic, planar forms, Promenade dans les bois de Châteauneu also underscores the enduring influence of Japanese art on French aesthetics. The painting also recalls fresco murals that the artist may have seen during his trip to Italy in the spring of 1893. He particularly liked paintings by Giotto, Fra Angelico, and their respective followers, recognising in their art a shared love of ‘large decorative schemes, flat colour application, simple compositions, and monumental figures’ (ibid., p. 91). The warm brown of the present work seems a nod to the golden backgrounds that fill such Renaissance works.
While Sérusier continued to be captivated by the Breton people – so much so that he moved to the region permanently in 1894 – over the course of the 1890s, he moved away from idealisation towards ‘a new awareness of the actuality of Brittany’ (C. Boyle-Turner, Paul Sérusier, Ann Arbor, 1983, p. 62). Indeed, describing the works of these years, the critic Albert Aurier wrote that Sérusier’s recent canvases present ‘a poetic symbolism… a beautiful and masterly synthesis of lines and colours [that] indicate an artist of the first rank’ (A. Aurier quoted in op. cit., 1978, p. 483).