Color as Feeling

Paul Sérusier

The Seaweed Gatherer

c. 1890

Oil on canvas, 46 × 54.9 cm. Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields

A stone wall runs across a stretch of Breton coast below rolling fields. Land, mounds and water are simplified into a few warm and cool shapes.

• The land rises in rolling bands of color stacked up the canvas, with little sense of deep space. The coast becomes a flat, patterned surface.
• The view shows the shoreline close to Le Pouldu, in Brittany.
• Look at the two rust-colored mounds: seaweed hauled up off the shore to feed the fields.
• The worker is a flat shape, his curved back echoing the hills.
• It came to Indianapolis in 1998 with the Samuel Josefowitz collection of Pont-Aven art.

After his death the canvas passed to his widow, who left it to her friend Paule Boutaric. He signed this canvas only with his initials, in reddish paint.

Image: Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields · Public domain