Coastal Landscape from Martinique

Coastal Landscape from Martinique (1887) at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek belongs to the pivotal group of works Gauguin made during his four months in the French Caribbean in 1887 — the stay that permanently transformed his artistic sensibility before his Pacific departure. The Martinique coastal landscape offered him tropical light, dense vegetation, and a non-European population that confirmed his conviction that his future lay outside Europe. The specific quality of Caribbean light — more intense, more directly overhead than northern French light — demanded a chromatic response beyond what Impressionist notation could provide, and Gauguin's Martinique paintings show the beginning of the color intensification and formal simplification that would reach their full development in Tahiti. The Glyptotek's possession of this Martinique canvas alongside early works and later Breton and Tahitian canvases gives Copenhagen the full developmental arc of his tropical engagement.

The tropical vegetation is rendered in dense, rich greens that overwhelm the composition in a way impossible in Breton or Norman landscape. The coastal setting provides a horizontal blue distance against the foreground weight of the foliage. Handling is more Impressionistic than the later Tahitian work but shows the Cézannesque structural influence already present.