Pont-Aven
French village on the Aven river in Brittany, 260 km west of Paris and 7 km north of the Bay of Biscay. Before the 20th century its protected tidal harbour made it a busy commercial port for the transport of flour, firewood and fish. Though it attracted artists from the 1860s onwards, it is most famous for the colony of artists that gathered there around Paul Gauguin in the late 1880s and early 1890s. According
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Pont-Aven
French village on the Aven river in Brittany, 260 km west of Paris and 7 km north of the Bay of Biscay. Before the 20th century its protected tidal harbour made it a busy commercial port for the transport of flour, firewood and fish. Though it attracted artists from the 1860s onwards, it is most famous for the colony of artists that gathered there around Paul Gauguin in the late 1880s and early 1890s. According to Emile Bernard, the first artist to paint in Pont-Aven was the Dutchman Herman van den Anker (1832–83). His Salon paintings in the 1860s faithfully depict the costumes and customs of Breton peasants, whose clothes point precisely to Pont-Aven as their village of origin. In 1864 the American artist Robert Wylie (1839–77) settled in the village and, except for brief trips to Paris, remained there until his death. By 1866 a small group of American artists had moved to Pont-Aven in the summer in search of picturesque Breton subjects. They were primarily former students of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia who had spent the previous academic year painting in Paris. In 1876 there were at least 11 American artists in the village as well as several Frenchmen and van den Anker.
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