Special Loan from the Los Angeles County Museum of Fine Arts (LACMA)
Pork herd»Paul Gauguin (1888) on display at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.
Between 1886 and 1890, Gauguin left Paris for a series of trips to Brittany, a province in western France. Due to its Celtic origin, Brittany attracted artists seeking an “exotic” culture that would seem untouched by bourgeois society. That year, when Gauguin painted this picture, where a peasant looked after pigs in the picturesque village of Pont-Aven, he wrote to a friend: “I like Brittany. Here I find a wild, primitive quality. When my wooden shoes echo across this granite land, I hear the dull, muffled, powerful sound that I seek in painting. "