Dogs Running in a Meadow

Gauguin painted dogs running freely through an open Breton meadow in 1888, the same year he produced The Vision After the Sermon — the two canvases illustrating the enormous range of his Pont-Aven period, from visionary religious symbolism to direct observation of rural life. The running dogs offered a subject of pure movement and instinctive energy, qualities he associated with the pre-modern Breton world he had come to inhabit. That summer he was codifying with Émile Bernard the Cloisonnist approach — bold outlines separating flat color areas, derived in part from their shared enthusiasm for Japanese woodblock prints and medieval stained glass — and this canvas shows that method applied to a subject of spontaneous animal motion. The tension between the simplified, somewhat static formal language of Cloisonnism and the inherent dynamism of running animals gave the painting its energy. Degas had painted similar subjects — his racehorses in motion — but with an entirely different formal approach: the Impressionist recording of instantaneous movement versus Gauguin's more deliberate, patterned synthesis.

Gauguin organizes the canvas into broad zones of green meadow and pale sky with minimal tonal transition. The dogs are rendered in simplified forms with strong contours beginning to assert themselves. Paint is applied in relatively flat, matte layers, moving away from the shimmering surface of Impressionism.