Boulders Along the Aven

Henry Moret was a member of the Pont-Aven School during the years that Gauguin was in Brittany, after which he returned to his natural penchant for Impressionism. This Synthetist work depicts a landscape structured along a diagonal line dividing the rocks and greenery of the foreground from the River Aven and a few houses. Between these two areas, and linking them, a young boy wearing a beret stands looking at the river. The scene is from a bird’s-eye perspective, with the sky reduced to a horizontal line. Moret used his preferred colour harmony of greens and pinks for this painting, applying the colours with short parallel strokes. The deliberate simplicity, diagonal composition and saturated colour of this work illustrate the lesson Moret had drawn from Gauguin: seek the essential, eliminate detail and anecdote, and retain only what is vital.