Paul Gauguin

Oslo, Nasjonal-galleriet; Stockholm, Nationalmuseum; Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Paul Gauguin, ses œuvres dans les collections scandinaves, 1926, no. 26
Basel, Kunsthalle, 1928, no. 9

Gauguin began collecting Impressionist art in late 1978, and acquired several paintings by Pissarro under the influence of his guardian Gustave Arosa. The acquisition of these works resulted in an invitation to Pontoise, a small village to the northwest of Paris which was home to the older artist, and one of the early centres of Impressionism.

Dating from 1882, this bucolic scene reveals an artist still very much in the thrall of his mentor Pissarro. Gauguin had been profoundly influenced by the 1879 exhibition of Impressionist art, particularly by the Monet and Pissarro gallery, and in this work Gauguin imitates the thick impasto of the heavily worked paint surfaces created by these artists. The short, twisted strokes used to render the landscape are particularly reminiscent of Pissarro's technique of structuring of the paint surface to project the canvas into the space of the viewer, and it seems that following his comparative failure in the 1882 exhibition of Impressionist art, Gauguin relied more closely than before on the techniques of his tutor Pissarro. However, there are some distinctive touches, indicative of both the growing influence of Cézanne, who was working around Pontoise in 1882, and the emergence of a more individual artistic stance, particular in the purplish tones used to render the rocks to the lower right of the work.

It has been suggested by Syvie Crussard that this work is part of a trio of paintings with identical compositions and formats which investigate different atmospheric effects. Two are known to us, the present work and Le Carrières du Chou à Pontoise - II in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, but in a letter dated 9^th November 1882 Gauguin refers to a third larger work in which he describes a quarry scene with temps gris, suggesting that Gauguin was experimenting with Monet's practice of creating several identical landscapes.

However, over and above his immediate contemporaries, these sparse landscapes recall the spatially ambiguous and romantically empty landscapes of Gustave Courbet. The retrospective held at the École des Beaux-Arts in May 1982 returned Courbet's work to the forefront of the general public consciousness, and the elemental nature of these quarry scenes attest to the admiration felt by Gauguin for the powerful, windswept works by his 19^th century predecessor.