The Children's Supper

Paul Sérusier, primogenitor of the Nabi group of Symbolist painters, was born in Paris on November, 1864. Raised in an affluent, bourgeois household, Sérusier attended the best schools in Paris including the Lycée Concordet where he earned two high-school diplomas, one in philosophy and the other in mathematics. Paul’s father, Louis Sérusier, was a perfume manufacturer who wanted his son to follow the familial footsteps into the world of business. Despite his academic bent and scholarly success at the Lycée Concordet—a school attended in the 1880s by several future Symbolist painters and writers—to his parent’s dismay Paul was not interested in devoting his life to commerce. Instead, in 1885, he enrolled at the Académie Julian where a rising generation of avant-garde painters met and mingled. In the course of the 1880s, Julian’s academy, open to anyone able to pay the tuition fee, was attended by Vincent van Gogh, Emile Bernard, and Edouard Vuillard, among others.Sérusier’s earliest works, 1886–1888, evoke the genre scenes of Jules Bastien-Lepage, the most celebrated Naturalist painter of his time. The subjects of these works are culled from a lexicon of rural imagery that matched the prevailing bourgeois taste for nostalgic representations of the countryside. Nothing in these images hint at the transformation Sérusier’s art would undergo in Brittany, on the western coast of France, in the autumn of 1888. In early October that year, in the village of Pont-Aven, Sérusier received a famous painting lesson from one of the pioneers of Synthetic-Symbolism, Paul Gauguin. The result of this lesson was an abstract landscape painted on a small wood panel. During the winter of 1888–1889, among Sérusier’s Nabi friends in Paris, the picture was christened The Talisman. Sérusier himself became a leading figure among the Nabis, a pseudo-religious brotherhood of painters inspired by medieval culture and mysticism on the one hand, and by Japanese prints and the avant-garde art of Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard on the other.The Children’s Supper, painted in 1909, probably in the Breton town of Châteauneuf-du-Faou, exemplifies Sérusier’s life-long commitment to the archaic motifs he had adopted as the staple of his art two decades earlier. Breton youngsters clad in traditional headgear and clothes feature in dozens of his works. These images do not represent realities of everyday life in the French countryside, but evoke instead the artist’s and his public’s yearning to salvage and visually sustain tidbits of days long past. Catholic moral values were also important to Sérusier as manifest, for example, in the separation of the sexes in The Children’s Supper. Significantly, after his early experiment with non-objective art as manifest in the The Talisman of 1888, Sérusier never ventured again into the realm of pure abstraction. Instead, he developed a style indebted to the primitive lines of woodcuts and bulky forms of wooden sculptures—note the lack of figural articulation in the faces and hands of the sitters in The Children’s Supper. In this work, as in many others, Sérusier walks a tight line between aesthetic modernism and ideological conservatism.