Autumn in Brittany (The Willow Tree)

Autumn in Brittany (The Willow Tree, 1889) at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art belongs to the period of Gauguin's most intense Synthetist development, when he and Émile Bernard were transforming the Breton landscape into a vehicle for symbolic and formal ideas that went far beyond Impressionist observation. The willow tree — traditionally associated with grief and melancholy in European iconography — provided a subject whose existing symbolic associations could be amplified by Gauguin's boldly simplified treatment. By 1889 he was working simultaneously on the Vision after the Sermon (painted earlier that year), which had entirely abandoned naturalism for symbolic color and flattened form, and this autumn landscape shows the same principles applied to a more conventional landscape subject. Japanese woodblock prints, which Gauguin and the Pont-Aven painters collected, had demonstrated that a tree could be rendered through calligraphic stroke and flat color zone rather than through the atmospheric Impressionist notation they had inherited from their predecessors.

The willow is drawn with sweeping, calligraphic strokes that give it an almost Japanese ink-painting quality. Warm autumn tones fill the picture plane with a decorative mosaic of colour. Outlines are deliberate and defining. The sky is handled simply, without atmospheric elaboration, reinforcing the overall flat, iconic quality of the composition.