.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Following the collapse of the stock market in January 1882, Gauguin left the brokerage business in which he had previously made a comfortable living for himself and his growing family, and committed himself to becoming a painter. He believed that he could successfully apply his business acumen to the art market. Living on rue Carcel, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, the artist turned his immediate environment into his subject. With the rapid expansion of the railway network, far-away towns were accessible in a matter of minutes; Gauguin spent his days travelling between Paris and its environs, Pontoise and Osny, in a bid to strike down his unique painterly voice. It is against a backdrop of optimism, personal liberation, and tireless experimentation that Gauguin executed Vue de Rouen. Over the course of the next couple of years, however, his fortunes ebbed and the needs of his family became an insurmountable burden.
A portrait of his new home, the present work depicts Rouen from its bucolic fringes. Lasting from January to November 1884, Gauguin’s relocation to Rouen provided the setting for the first truly productive period in the artist’s output. The Normandy city became both a site for Gauguin’s personal reinvention and a platform for radical stylistic experimentation. It was also, however, a place of familial and financial struggle for the artist. Having hoped to cultivate a new clientele with progressive tastes among the sizable Scandinavian contingent living there, Gauguin soon discovered that there was little interest among the Rouen bourgeoisie for his paintings. With a wife and five children crowded into quarters smaller than they had in Paris, his apartment on the Impasse Malherne was not conducive to painting. It is perhaps for this reason that so many of his Rouen works were executed en plein air.
The wistful tranquility of the present work does not disclose Gauguin’s personal tumult at the time. What the Rouen works of the early 1880s do reveal, however, is the painter's growing mastery of Impressionist techniques and the development of his own distinctive style. This has therefore questioned the earlier dating of '1882' in the signature which would pre-empt his move to Rouen. We can confidently date Vue de Rouen as painted in 1884 both through its subject matter and stylistic execution.
Reposing on the gentle undulations of the suburban countryside, a single figure, seen in profile is dwarfed by a rising townscape. Captured at the cusp of spring, around him newly blossomed branches of diverse fruit trees wave in the breeze. The ground, wrought in myriad strokes of pink, blue, green, and ochre form a rhythmic, dense pattern, miming the swaying movement of lush grass. In stark contrast with the fluidity of the foreground scene, a band of monolithic buildings stretches across the upper half of the composition, their smooth slate roofs reflecting blue the dappled sky, a motif that would Gauguin would recycle throughout his Rouen canvases.
Erring towards abstraction, with its flattened perspective, pronounced outlines, and bold palette (particularly in the middle distance), the present work prefigures Gauguin’s leading role in the Pont-Aven movement and his renowned Tahitian paintings to come. Yet, whilst the works from these future periods would tend towards simplified, block colouration, the complex and rich handling of Vue de Rouen evidences the influence of contemporary artists on Gaugin’s early oeuvre, in particular, the techniques of Camille Pissarro and Paul Cezanne.
Gauguin first started to collect Impressionist art in late 1878. Having steeped himself in the movement, in the late 1870s he developed a close relationship with Camille Pissarro, his self-professed ‘Master’. Proving to be an important mentor during the rocky mid-1880s, it was Pissarro who first introduced Gauguin to Paul Cezanne in mid-1881 when painting together in Pontoise. Gauguin’s encounter with Cezanne would revolutionise the young artist’s oeuvre, providing the groundwork for the genesis of his subsequent anti-naturalist, synthetist style.
Following the meeting, Gauguin purchased two works by the artist, including Still Life with Fruit Dish, now at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Studying Cezanne closely, Gauguin abandoned his atmospheric studies of light and space in favour of a greater density, and his canvases began to exemplify ‘the distortion or sculpturing of space, forms built from faceted or simplified volumes, and an increasing emphasis on the surface of the picture; this he animated, disrupted or constructed by broadening or elongating his brushstrokes, grouping them in sometimes divergent sets of parallel marks’ (S. Crussard, Gauguin, A Savage in the Making, Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings (1873-1888), vol. 1, Paris & Milan, 2002, p. 52).
Where the impasto of Vue de Rouen bespeaks Pissarro’s textured hand, it is the touch of Cezanne that we see in the passage of grass to the left of the composition, in the stone wall which separates fore- and mid-ground, in the rustling trees, and reflective roofs. This accomplished and expressive landscape manifests Gauguin’s effort to invent a more personal pictorial language in the early 1880s, or as he wrote to Pissarro, his attempt to paint ‘very broadly and not monotonously’ (quoted in R. Brettell & A.-B. Fonsmark, Gauguin and Impressionism, exh. cat. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 2005, p. 200). Commenting on this formative period, Richard Brettell has noted that ‘Gauguin's willingness to struggle competitively with others and to suppress his own strong will in collaborative working sessions surely contributed to the growing maturity of both his art and theory. The importance of Cezanne in this equation cannot be underestimated’ (in ibid., p. 171).
A portrait of his new home, the present work depicts Rouen from its bucolic fringes. Lasting from January to November 1884, Gauguin’s relocation to Rouen provided the setting for the first truly productive period in the artist’s output. The Normandy city became both a site for Gauguin’s personal reinvention and a platform for radical stylistic experimentation. It was also, however, a place of familial and financial struggle for the artist. Having hoped to cultivate a new clientele with progressive tastes among the sizable Scandinavian contingent living there, Gauguin soon discovered that there was little interest among the Rouen bourgeoisie for his paintings. With a wife and five children crowded into quarters smaller than they had in Paris, his apartment on the Impasse Malherne was not conducive to painting. It is perhaps for this reason that so many of his Rouen works were executed en plein air.
The wistful tranquility of the present work does not disclose Gauguin’s personal tumult at the time. What the Rouen works of the early 1880s do reveal, however, is the painter's growing mastery of Impressionist techniques and the development of his own distinctive style. This has therefore questioned the earlier dating of '1882' in the signature which would pre-empt his move to Rouen. We can confidently date Vue de Rouen as painted in 1884 both through its subject matter and stylistic execution.
Reposing on the gentle undulations of the suburban countryside, a single figure, seen in profile is dwarfed by a rising townscape. Captured at the cusp of spring, around him newly blossomed branches of diverse fruit trees wave in the breeze. The ground, wrought in myriad strokes of pink, blue, green, and ochre form a rhythmic, dense pattern, miming the swaying movement of lush grass. In stark contrast with the fluidity of the foreground scene, a band of monolithic buildings stretches across the upper half of the composition, their smooth slate roofs reflecting blue the dappled sky, a motif that would Gauguin would recycle throughout his Rouen canvases.
Erring towards abstraction, with its flattened perspective, pronounced outlines, and bold palette (particularly in the middle distance), the present work prefigures Gauguin’s leading role in the Pont-Aven movement and his renowned Tahitian paintings to come. Yet, whilst the works from these future periods would tend towards simplified, block colouration, the complex and rich handling of Vue de Rouen evidences the influence of contemporary artists on Gaugin’s early oeuvre, in particular, the techniques of Camille Pissarro and Paul Cezanne.
Gauguin first started to collect Impressionist art in late 1878. Having steeped himself in the movement, in the late 1870s he developed a close relationship with Camille Pissarro, his self-professed ‘Master’. Proving to be an important mentor during the rocky mid-1880s, it was Pissarro who first introduced Gauguin to Paul Cezanne in mid-1881 when painting together in Pontoise. Gauguin’s encounter with Cezanne would revolutionise the young artist’s oeuvre, providing the groundwork for the genesis of his subsequent anti-naturalist, synthetist style.
Following the meeting, Gauguin purchased two works by the artist, including Still Life with Fruit Dish, now at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Studying Cezanne closely, Gauguin abandoned his atmospheric studies of light and space in favour of a greater density, and his canvases began to exemplify ‘the distortion or sculpturing of space, forms built from faceted or simplified volumes, and an increasing emphasis on the surface of the picture; this he animated, disrupted or constructed by broadening or elongating his brushstrokes, grouping them in sometimes divergent sets of parallel marks’ (S. Crussard, Gauguin, A Savage in the Making, Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings (1873-1888), vol. 1, Paris & Milan, 2002, p. 52).
Where the impasto of Vue de Rouen bespeaks Pissarro’s textured hand, it is the touch of Cezanne that we see in the passage of grass to the left of the composition, in the stone wall which separates fore- and mid-ground, in the rustling trees, and reflective roofs. This accomplished and expressive landscape manifests Gauguin’s effort to invent a more personal pictorial language in the early 1880s, or as he wrote to Pissarro, his attempt to paint ‘very broadly and not monotonously’ (quoted in R. Brettell & A.-B. Fonsmark, Gauguin and Impressionism, exh. cat. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 2005, p. 200). Commenting on this formative period, Richard Brettell has noted that ‘Gauguin's willingness to struggle competitively with others and to suppress his own strong will in collaborative working sessions surely contributed to the growing maturity of both his art and theory. The importance of Cezanne in this equation cannot be underestimated’ (in ibid., p. 171).