French painter, cloisonnist, synthetist, symbolist

Emile Bernard was born in 1868, in Lille, France; and in 1881 moved to Paris with his family. A painter of mythological compositions, religious subjects, genre paintings, portraits, nudes, landscapes, urban landscapes, and still-life, Bernard worked in gouache and watercolor; he was also a painter of cartoons for tapestries, a sculptor, an engraver, and an illustrator.

Creator of the "synthetic symbolism", and as such the inventor of a new vision, Bernard evolved later in his works to a return to the classic art, after having played an essential role of initiator for Gauguin and the group artists known for having worked out of Pont-Aven.

His early passion for drawing was opposed by his father but supported by his grandmother. Registered in the Studio of Cormon, in 1885, he met Anquetin and Toulouse-Lautrec with whom he becomes friends.

Expelled for insubordination, he traversed on foot Normandy and Brittany, in 1886. In Concarneau, he met Schuffenecker who sent him to Pont-Aven to meet Gauguin. In Asnières, he painted with Van Gogh; Signac, who had noticed him, came to visit him.

During the summer of 1887, Bernard was in Saint-Briac, in the pension of Mrs. Lemasson where he tried his first tests of "cloisonnism". In August 1888, he was twenty years old and living in Pont-Aven with his sister Madeleine. He became friends with Gauguin, and working together, their collaboration produced the esthetics characteristic of works from Pont-Aven.

Bernard spent the summer of 1889 in Brittany, after having shown at the Café Volpini with other artists of the Pont-Aven's group. In 1890, he tried to earn a living in Lille by drawing fabrics but he quickly abandoned that project. He quarreled with Gauguin in 1891, but he also showed his work that year at the "Indépendants" and Barc de Boutteville.

He took part in the 1892 "Salon de la Rose Croix” in Pont-Aven; and in 1893, thanks to the financial assistance of the Count of Rochefoucauld, he left for Constantinople where he lived until 1904.

Upon returning to France, he visited Cézanne lived for a time in Tonnerre. He traveled frequently to Italy, returned to Pont-Aven between 1939 and 1940 and died in Paris in 1941.

Museum Collections

• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

• Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina

• Appleton Museum of Art, Florida

• Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

• High Museum of Art, Georgia

• Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana

• Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany

• MacKenzie Art Gallery, Saskatchewan

• Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, France

• Polish National Museum in Warsaw

• Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas

• Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam