Group of young painters who espoused a style known as Synthetism and united under the tutelage of Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven, Brittany, France, in the late 1880s and early 1890s.
The artists included Émile Bernard, Charles Laval, Maxime Maufra, Paul Sérusier, Charles Filiger, Jacob Meyer de Haan, Armand Séguin, and Henri de Chamaillard. Their paintings showed an overall simplification, a highly expressive use of colour, and an intensely spiritual subject matter. When Gauguin left for Tahiti, members of the school became increasingly involved in developing the theories and techniques of Symbolism .