We drove down on Sunday morning to le Pouldu, the second village Gauguin stayed in, a coastal hamlet that now has a number of vacation houses and condominiums but in the late 1880's was just a tiny village backed by farmland and fronting a bold rocky coast with a couple of sandy beaches. This building is a reconstruction of the rooming house run by Marie Henry that Gauguin stayed in with Meyer de Haan, a Dutch painter whose family paid a stipend that supported the two painters, Gauguin serving as teacher. Over the winter, the two painters decorated the dining room with paintings that were wallpapered over and only discovered years later.
This beach appears in several of Gauguin's paintings. The area is windswept with most of the trees leaning inland from the severity of the ocean breezes. It was blowing a steady twenty five knots when we first arrived. The last white house on the lower right was the only structure when Gauguin painted here. It's pictured below, centered in the photograph, and painted from the side in Gauguin's work.
Most of the farms from Gauguin's time have disappeared, but this boarded up house sits just back in the fields behind the village.
The little church in le Pouldu has been restored and still has the carvings both in stone and wood that inspired Gauguin's Yellow Christ and other works.
Figure at the corner of the roof.
Polychromed Christ hung from one of the beams in the church.
