Émile Bernard (1868-1941) is especially remembered today, because as a young man, he was a close friend of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. He was one the few persons to support and help van Gogh during the Paris years, 1886-1888. From Arles Van Gogh wrote a number of letters to Bernard, now in the van Gogh-museum in Amsterdam, which has made them accessible on the net.
Bernard himself was a very productive artist, writer and art theorist, more or less inventor of the concepts of Cloisonism (the colour divided by black lines) and Synthetism, which emphazises the trinity of artist, motive, and media - a very modern perception. This is also reflected in the actual painting, which seems to us to express both the feelings of the father and the son in a strict, almost cubistic composition of a red triangle in a dark square.
Over the years he moved towards a more traditional figurative style, as can be seen from this portrait of the son Antoine, born 1900. It is no coincidence, that Antoine is painted in his choir boy attire, since Bernard unlikemany of the modernists kept a close relation to the catholic church.
