Paul Gauguin - The market gardens of Vaugirard 1879
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The market gardens of Vaugirard 1879
66x100cm oil/canvas
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, USA
The image is only being used for informational and educational purposes
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From Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton:
This early Impressionist painting by Paul Gauguin depicts the gardens and architecture of Vaugirard, the left-bank quarter of Paris where Gauguin resided with his family during the late 1870s. He alluded to his own presence in the painting by including a chimney and rooftop in the foreground that may be part of his building. The influence of Camille Pissarro is evident in Gauguin's choice of suburban gardens for his subject, in his use of short, diagonal brushstrokes, and in his palette, composed primarily of greens and blues with touches of red. Gauguin painted with Pissarro, then his mentor, in Pontoise during the summers of 1879, 1880, and 1881. This painting was included in the fifth Impressionist exhibition of 1880, making his debut as an Impressionist painter. This painting represents a little-known phase in Gauguin's work, when he was still a successful financier and only a part-time painter. In 1886 he settled in Pont-Aven, Brittany, and began painting full time. There he developed his "synthetist" style, characterized by darkly-outlined areas of pure color, which he would explore further during his later years in Tahiti.