The Beach of Les Grands Sables at Le Pouldu

Paul Sérusier · 1890

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

60 × 70 cm (23 5/8 × 27 9/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

The Beach of Les Grands Sables at Le Pouldu captures the rugged Breton coastline with a flatness and intensity that feels more like a vision than a view. Sérusier painted this in 1890, just two years after his transformative encounter with Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven, where Gauguin famously guided him to paint not what he saw but what he felt — the result of that lesson, a small board now known as *The Talisman*, became a foundational document of Post-Impressionist colour theory. Le Pouldu was where Sérusier and Gauguin retreated when Pont-Aven grew too crowded with painters, and the village's bleaker, windswept shore suited their ambitions perfectly. In this work, colour does the structural work: ochres, muted greens, and cool greys are laid down in broad, deliberate strokes that reduce the landscape to its essential mood rather than its surface detail. Sérusier was a co-founder of the Nabis, the group that took Gauguin's synthetism indoors and made it a philosophy of painting. Our hand-painted oil reproduction follows the original canvas in scale and technique, preserving the weight of those brushstrokes and the particular restraint of Sérusier's palette that no print can honestly replicate.