Brittany Landscape

Brittany Landscape by Paul Gauguin, painted in 1888, is an oil on canvas created during a critical phase of the artist's Post-Impressionist development. Executed during the vital artistic period spanning 1876 to 1900, the work reflects the profound shift in French painting away from naturalistic representation toward a more emotionally and stylistically expressive language. Gauguin painted this canvas while working at the artist community in Pont-Aven, Brittany, a location he sought out for its traditional, rugged culture, which inspired his move toward the synthetic aesthetic now known as Cloisonnism.

This piece exemplifies Gauguin’s emerging style, characterized by simplified forms, bold outlining, and large areas of flat, non-naturalistic color. Unlike the Impressionists who focused on the transient effects of light, Gauguin was concerned with the expressive power of color and line, prioritizing subjective feeling over optical accuracy. The handling of the landscape in Brittany Landscape utilizes intense chromatic choices, where fields and hills are rendered in broad, distinct planes. Gauguin’s method of flattening pictorial depth and using color symbolically makes this canvas a pivotal example of his rebellion against Academic norms and foreshadows his later radical compositions created in the South Pacific.

The work represents a fundamental moment in the history of Modern Art, demonstrating the artist’s mastery and innovative contributions to Post-Impressionism. As a major painting from this influential period, it illustrates why Gauguin is considered one of the most important French painters of the late 19th century. This specific canvas is part of the esteemed collection housed at the National Gallery of Art. Today, the artistic importance of the piece ensures it remains highly visible to researchers; high-quality prints and images of this seminal work are widely available, often entering the public domain due to the age of the original source material.