gauguin used reality only as a pretext for what feneon called distanced creations. by the late 1880s, these artists started to abandon the attempt to engage with modernity in the form of the city. they left for regions and cultures in which they were tourists. tourists travel to places where the customs of the people can be absorbed as sights, as experiences, of the different and the new. the avant-garde artists went to a prosperous, developing brittany, but imagined it as primitive, mystic, and strange. in august 1888, bernard painted breton women in a meadow. it depicts the display and leisure of a breton sunday outing, and it is clearly a direct response to seurat's grande jatte. but it is very different. bernard emphasizes the flatness of the picture surface. he does not use traditional perspective, and he makes no attempt at naturalism. instead, he used the example of japanese prints and medieval stained glass to compose a picture that is only held together by its own invented order of marks and colors on a flat surface. as a result of such stylization, we have