Les meules jaunes ou La moisson blonde

When Paul Gauguin moved to Pont-Aven, he began to paint the daily life of the Breton peasantry. The scene that is represented here, in the immediate vicinity of a farm, shows the conscientious arrangement of the sheaves of wheat mounted on a wheel and covered with straw to protect them from the weather. He does not seek to reproduce it faithfully but to apply his "synthesist" doctrine. He advocated the exaltation of feeling by daring to use color, simplifying geometric forms and eliminating any effect of depth. The elements become large flat areas colored in the colors dear to the artist. Central subject of the painting, the enormous mass of the millstone dominates the barely sketched silhouettes of the two anecdotal women who seem ready to be engulfed in it. A mise en abyme of Gauguin's own desire for immersion in color.