Coast at Dieppe

Coast at Dieppe (c.1885) at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek was painted during one of the difficult summers of Gauguin's transitional period, when he had left the Bourse and was trying to establish himself as a full-time painter while his family was retreating to Copenhagen. The Normandy coast had been a canonical Impressionist subject since Monet's Étretat and Dieppe paintings of the late 1870s, and Gauguin's decision to paint the same coastline placed him in direct dialogue with the tradition he was preparing to move beyond. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen — the museum founded by the Carlsberg brewery heir Carl Jacobsen — holds this canvas as part of its strong French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection, and its presence there is partly explained by Gauguin's personal connection to Denmark through his marriage to Mette. The coastal landscape's formal clarity — cliffs, sea, sky in distinct horizontal bands — suited the Impressionist vocabulary he was still working within, and the canvas shows no sign of the Synthetist break that would come within two years.

The cliff and beach are rendered in high-keyed colour with Impressionist broken touch. The water is built from horizontal strokes of blue-green and white. The handling is fluent and technically accomplished within the Impressionist idiom, with the sky providing a particularly airy range of blues and creams.