Paul Sérusier was a founding member of the Nabis, a group of young French painters who redefined representation in art through from the 1880s through the 1890s. Sérusier named the group for the Hebrew word for “prophet,” after their artistic idol and “prophet,” Paul Gauguin. Sérusier and his peers admired the elder artist for his Symbolist approach to color and subject matter, wherein symbolic resonance was prized over realism. One of the most articulate and theoretically committed of the Nabis artists, Sérusier’s intellectual engagement with the movement shines forth in his uniquely shaped canvas, La Cueillette des pommes, 1891. Arguably one of the most significant works from the artist’s short career, this work represents the culmination of Sérusier’s studies with Gauguin, as the artist forged his voice as both Symbolist and Nabi.

“I’m going to leave behind the girls with the pretty white headdresses for the young girls in tatters, yellow, thin, and strong, who watch their cows on the great rocky cliffs… I’m working here in small gardens full of flowers; I aspire to the dry and simple solitude of the coasts. I dream of such grand things...”
—Paul Sérusier, letter to Maurice Denis, Pont Aven, 1889Sérusier spent the summers of 1889 and 1890 in Le Pouldu, Brittany, painting with Gauguin, and La Cueillette des pommes builds off of the lessons of these summers. Significantly, as Dr. Caroline Boyle-Turner writes, the work is Sérusier’s first allegorical painting.ⁱ Boyle-Turner identifies the landscape of La Cueillette des pommes as that of the bluff above la Plage des Grands Stables at Le Pouldu, but instead of choosing a strictly representational composition, Sérusier builds off of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ allegorical mural, Inter artes et naturam, c. 1890, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which Sérusier may have seen at the Salon du Champs-de-Mars in 1890.ⁱⁱ

 

La Cueillette des pommes functions as a triptych across three shaped canvas panels, depicting the stages of the harvest of an apple tree in rural Brittany as an allegory of knowledge. The woman and baby at left, both in white caps, represent innocence, sitting under a tree ripe with fruit waiting to be tasted. At center, the youthful figures acquire knowledge as they harvest fruit from the apple tree, in a classic invocation of the Judeo-Christian Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden; these reaching figures also parallel the pose of the woman and child picking fruit in Puvis de Chavannes’ Inter artes et naturam. At right, figures in black caps, representing old age, walk away, skirts laden with untasted fruit, and a barren tree behind them. 

 

The expanded chronology of the allegory unfolds like a narrative across time, and its articulation across three panels gives La Cueillette des pommes a frieze-like quality. And yet, there is a quality of stillness, a serenity that evokes Puvis de Chavannes’ Neo-Classical sensibility. The women wear timeless peasant clothes, rendered by Sérusier in brighter-than-life colors that expand into the countryside beyond. There’s a medievalism akin to the pre-Raphaelites here, evoked by the triptych form akin to medieval and Renaissance folding altarpieces, and yet the mode of painting is distinctly Nabis, uniquely Sérusier. The allegorical theme of apple-pickers captivated Sérusier, even as his painting style evolved past the Nabis. His circa 1912 painting, Age d’or, ou la cueilleur de pommes, returns to the same theme as the present work, revealing the enduring resonance of La Cueillette des pommes across his career.

 

Raised in Paris, Sérusier admired what he perceived as the simplicity and raw honesty of country life in Brittany. He wrote with rapturous eagerness to fellow Nabi Maurice Denis, of the “young girls in tatters, yellow, thin, and strong,” whom he painted; of the rocky cliffs and expansive countryside.ⁱⁱⁱ Inspired by Gauguin, Sérusier and the Nabis integrated their sincere emotional response to the countryside back into their paintings of the region through a heightened, Symbolist use of color, and the invocation of medieval, folk, Japanese, and other so-called “primitive” aesthetics.^iv

 

Sérusier, in particular, held a marked interest in how color could be most effectively used in painting. Inspired by a painting lesson with Gauguin in Pont Aven in 1888, Sérusier shared the elder artist’s Symbolist technique of using pure color to emotive, rather than strictly representational, effect with his Nabis peers. With Gauguin’s technique as a springboard, Sérusier developed his own color theory across the 1890s, which he relayed in lengthy correspondence to Denis and minor Nabi painter Jan Willibrod Verkade.^v He also seems to have shared his ideas in letters to Gauguin himself, as extant responses from Gauguin from 1891, the year of La Cueillette des pommes’ creation, indicate: “You are kind to attribute your intellectual progress to me,” Gauguin wrote, “though I played only a small part… you made this progress, it is you who made this happen.”^vi

“Sérusier was not just a friend and disciple of Gauguin. Sérusier made paintings of a highly personal quality.”
—Marius-Art Leblond

As Gauguin’s response to Sérusier’s lost letter of 1891 suggests, by this time, the student had evolved his own style, independent of his teacher. It is possible, too, that Sérusier’s work in 1891 influenced Gauguin in turn, as there are marked compositional similarities between La Cueillette des pommes and Gauguin’s 1897-1898 masterpiece, Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Most noticeably, the two works share a central figure picking fruit, though there are parallels in the arrangements of seated figures at left, and walking figures at right, as well. Both works encapsulate multiple chronologies within these compositions, creating a sense of simultaneity, narrative continuity, and timelessness at once. In addition to these formal similarities, both Sérusier and Gauguin use a heightened sense of color and a flattened picture plane to emphasize the emotional, sensory impact of their subject matter. 

 

For Sérusier, color elevated the timeless relevance of the apple-picking scene. He rendered the silhouette of the apple tree in a quintessential autumnal vermillion, while the grass is bright and vernal, and the sea behind a deep, cerulean summer hue. The apples gather in skirts and baskets in painterly flashes of green, pink and sunshine yellow, symbolizing a fruitful harvest more than any particular variety of apples. The abundance of Sérusier’s scene transcends seasons, in a Nabi celebration of color and form on the coast of Brittany.

 

 

ⁱ Caroline Boyle-Turner, “Triptyque: La Cueillette des Pommes or Le Paravent, c. 1891,” L’Éclatement de L’Impressionnisme, Musée Départemental du Prieuré, 2000.

ⁱⁱ  Ibid.

ⁱⁱⁱ  Paul Sérusier, letter to Maurice Denis, dated “Jour de Vénus, 1889,” in Sérusier, ABC de la peinture, Librairie Floury, Paris, 1950, p. 2, online.

^iv  Ibid., p. 3.

^v  Ibid., pp. 4, 15-17, et c.

^vi  Paul Gauguin, letter to Sérusier, dated Nov. 1891, ibid., p. 9.