Émile Henri Bernard (French pronunciation: [emil ɑ̃ʁi bɛʁnaʁ]; 28 April 1868 – 16 April 1941) was a French Post-Impressionist painter and writer, who had artistic friendships with Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Eugène Boch,[1] and at a later time, Paul Cézanne.

As in his younger years his sister was sick, Émile was unable to receive much attention from his parents; he therefore stayed with his grandmother, who owned a laundry in Lille, employing more than twenty people.

In 1884, joined the Atelier Cormon where he experimented with Impressionism and Pointillism and befriended fellow artists Louis Anquetin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

After being suspended from the École des Beaux-Arts for "showing expressive tendencies in his paintings", he toured Brittany on foot, where he was enamored by the tradition and landscape.

He stated that he had "a desire to [find] an art that would be of the most extreme simplicity and that would be accessible to all, so as not to practice its individuality, but collectively..." Gauguin was impressed by Bernard's ability to verbalize his ideas.

Gauguin had brought his new style from Pont-Aven exemplified in Vision after the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, a powerful work of visual symbolism of which he had already sent a sketch to van Gogh in September.

He also brought along Bernard's Le Pardon de Pont-Aven which he had exchanged for one of his paintings and which he used to decorate the shared workshop.

Druick 2001) This work was equally striking and illustrative of the style Émile Bernard had already acquainted van Gogh with when he sent him a batch of drawings in August, so much so that van Gogh made a watercolor copy of the Pardon (December 1888) which he sent to his brother, to recommend Bernard's new style to be promoted.

The following year van Gogh still vividly remembered the painting in his written portrait of Émile Bernard in a letter to his sister Wil (10 December 1889):"...it was so original I absolutely wanted to have a copy."

Druick 2001) One of Émile Bernard's drawings from the August batch ("...a lane of trees near the sea with two women talking in the foreground and some strollers" – Vincent van Gogh in a letter to Bernard – Arles 1888) also appears to have inspired the work van Gogh and Gauguin did on the Allée des Alyscamps in Arles.

Bernard theorized a style of painting with bold forms separated by dark contours which became known as cloisonnism.

Bernard believed that it "It is the invisible express by the visible,"[citation needed] and those previous attempts of religious symbolism failed.

It was always Émile Bernard's great frustration that Paul Gauguin never mentioned him as an influence on pictorial symbolism (see for instance his own notes attached to the Belgian edition (1942) of his selected letters, published shortly after his death).

Many letters sent from van Gogh and Gauguin to Bernard give historians a better idea of the artists lives and connection to their artwork.