Les lavandieres de Pont-Aven, by Paul Gauguin

 (First installment in a series of photo essays about our visit to Pont-Aven, a small village in Brittany, France.)  

My brother-in-law Ken emailed us that one of his colleagues at the university owned a house in Brittany, France.  Would we like to share a rental with them this summer?  We’d been to Paris several times over the years to visit good friends, with day trips to Versailles and Giverny and more, but we’d never been to Brittany and knew little about it.

(That's Brittany up there in the northwest corner of France, a province with its own rich Celtic-influenced culture and language, an area where the French spend their long seaside vacations, despite weather we Americans would consider too rainy for swimming.)

That’s how my husband and I find ourselves this July, stepping off the train at the station in Quimperle after several hour’s train ride from Paris to Lower Brittany.  Ken and Jane meet us at the station and we pile into their rented Fiat for the drive to our Brittany home near the village of Pont-Aven.

Once we get settled in "our" little rented cottage (see above), we drive to the village to look around. 

In the car, Jane opens the tourist guidebook she’s been reading. With a smile, I realize she’s the same kind of traveler I am – energetic, eager, guidebook always at the ready.  Meanwhile our husbands have fallen into deep conversation, as brothers sometimes do.

At that moment, I foresee we’ll be great traveling companions.

As we drive into town on Boulevard Emile Bernard, we catch our first glimpse of the little port of Pont-Aven, crowded with small boats, the gardens of the houses up on the hill overlooking the village, and then the village itself, little shops clustered together on the banks of the river Aven. 

Pont-Aven captures our hearts right away.  We park near la Place de Gauguin, noticing that many of the streets are names for the artists of Pont-Aven.

Jane’s guidebook tells us that from the Middle Ages into the 19^th century, little Pont-Aven was known for its mills.  The saying was, “14 watermills, 15 houses.”  That’s how small it was and how completely the mills dominated the town.  Today, only four of those mills remain, but they still cast their spell over the town, the stone bridges dripping with flowers, the sound of the river a constant hum.

Then, in the 1860s, the artists discovered Pont-Aven.  It actually started with an American artist, Robert Wylie. 

The Fortune teller by Robert Wylie

The artists were attracted to the light – both the quality and quantity of it, since in the summer the sun doesn’t set until 10:30 or later.  They were also drawn to the lush landscape, the rustic setting, the costumes of the Breton women, with their white lacy caps and wooden sabot.  The struggling artists also liked Pont-Aven because it was inexpensive.

Soon the American artists shared their secret with French artists.  In 1886, Felix Jobbe-Duval wrote to his friend Paul Gauguin, “It’s a little backwater, and cheap.”

I guess that was the magic word for Gauguin.  Above, you’ll see Gauguin’s painting of Les lavandieres de Pont Aven, the washerwomen, scrubbing clothes in the old French way, in the river.  Soon, Gauguin had attracted a group of artists – Irish, Dutch and German as well as French -- including Emile Bernard and Paul Serusier. 

It was here in Pont-Aven, among these people, that Gauguin developed and refined his philosophy, before his famous trip to Tahiti.  But I’ll tell more of that story in an upcoming installment. 

Here's another of Gauguin's most famous paintings of the people of Pont-Aven.

Girls of Pont-Aven by Gauguin

“The guidebook calls it ‘almost too picturesque,’” my sister-in-law tells us.  We laugh, but disagree with the guide -- We find it just picturesque enough.

We check out the bakeries and taste-test free samples of buttery Breton cakes and the cookies for which Pont-Aven is famous (“les galettes de Pont-Aven”).

We eat a delicious lunch of ham and cheese, wrapped in typical Breton buckwheat crepes.

Next installment: Market Day in Pont-Aven