past. He combined the stylized images of many Breton women praying in a shallow pictorial space with a vision of Jacob wrestling with an angel in the top right corner. The strong diagonal of a tree, which was inspired by Japanese prints, separates the real and imagined worlds depicted. The absence of depth, collapsing the distance between the witnessing women and the vision itself, is another technique adopted from Japanese art. The women in both paintings, in the rather dull peasant costume of Brittany, contrast sharply with the colorful backgrounds that surrounds them. The flat planes that characterize both portraits make no attempt to create an illusion of realism. The figures are distributed unconventionally, cut off and framing the canvas edge.The art of Symbolist painters such as Bernard and Gauguin were characterized by a desire to use suggestive subjects and images rather than explicit analogy or direct description. However, the movement was more interested in the content and concept of expression of the inner life rather than artistic style or form. In “Breton Woman and Haystacks”, Bernard sought expressive and decorative qualities at the expense of naturalism. The painting is filled with ideas of suggestion and ambiguity rather than direct conveyance of meaning. Symbolism favored feelings over reason, but was more intellectual in its conception. Bernard was a leading Symbolist who was working in Brittany when he introduced Gauguin to Cloisonism, a term used to describe the work of the French Symbolist painters who employed flattened, heavily outlined areas of color. Cloisonism was the art of outlining an object and then coloring it in using one, flat color much as in a child’s coloring book. The objects then appear very much like flat paper cutouts with little or no form. With this technique, colors hold very definite meanings. In “The Vision After the Sermon”, for example, the gro...
