Breton Panel with Cows
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Paul Sérusier painted Breton Panel with Cows in 1894, during the years he was living in Brittany and painting the local landscape and people. Black and white cows graze across an ochre field against a red sky, with a figure in a dark hat sitting in the foreground and another standing at a fence in the background. The composition is radically flattened — the cows are silhouettes, the field is a single unbroken tone, and the space is arranged vertically like a Japanese print. Sérusier co-founded the Nabis with Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard after a single afternoon painting with Gauguin at Pont-Aven in 1888, an experience that produced the painting they called The Talisman and that changed the direction of French art.