Two Breton Girls by the Sea

Two girls in traditional Breton dress, with caps and aprons, stand close together in the foreground, barefoot. The figures are placed off-center to the left, and behind them lie a cliff, an inlet and a sea with white waves. With almost no shading, flat areas of color bounded by outlines are set side by side, so the red of the earth and the yellow-green of the grass are sharply divided. This manner is called Cloisonnism. A pastel study of the figures alone also survives in a private collection in London.

Gauguin liked to visit Brittany, which had been left behind by modernization. This work was painted in the seaside village of Le Pouldu after his shared life with van Gogh in Arles in southern France broke down at the end of the previous year, and it is one of the representative works of his Breton period. The influence of Japanese ukiyo-e is strongest in Gauguin during this period, and such experiments were deepened further during his stay in Tahiti beginning in 1891.

Matsukata Kojiro bought this work from a Paris gallery in 1921. It was seized by the French government in 1944, returned to Japan in 1959, and entered the National Museum of Western Art.