Breton women with umbrellas

Mediums: oil, canvas.
Location: Museum d’Orsay, Paris.

Bernard painted this canvas when he was at Pont-Aven. The picture is created in bold outlines and colors, which extend Bernard’s monumental style of the late 1880s and signal his claim to be the originator of what he called ‘pictorial symbolism’. The artist depicted these figures in simplified shapes and bold colors. It seems that Bernard came to admire these women. He represented them as figures of devotion, as if they had stepped out of the art of the medieval ages.