Paul Sérusier

Born in Paris where, after graduating from the Lycée Condorcet with baccalaureates in philosophy and sciences, he attended the Academie Julian in 1886. It was here that Sérusier first met Maurice Denis. At the end of a summer vacation in Brittany in 1888, he met Paul Gauguin and the circle of artists working in Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu. Gauguin's lesson to Sérusier, and the work by Gauguin that Sérusier brought back to Paris, was to have a profound effect on the group that afterwards became known as the Nabis. As Maurice Denis recalled later, they felt liberated from the yoke of copying and called Gauguin's picture The Talisman.

Sérusier, an energetic propagandist for a form of painting which used pure colours and the artist's own symbolic and decorative logic, was a central figure of the Nabis, although by the 1890s, when he returned to Breton subjects, his figures were toned down. The influence of the aesthetic theories taught to him at the Benedictine monastery of Beuron, which he first visited in 1895, effectively distanced Sérusier from his Paris friends, and he settled in Brittany. His ABC of Painting, published in 1921, summarizes his aesthetic researches. Sérusier met Gauguin in 1888, leading to the formation of the Nabis. He was an early admirer of Cezanne. Sadler owned three works by Sérusier, including this one which was purchased from Drouet in Paris in September 1911