Entrance to the Village of Osny

Entrance to the Village of Osny (1882) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is a direct product of Gauguin's apprenticeship under Pissarro at the Pontoise-Osny area. Pissarro had been painting the village entrances, country lanes, and farm buildings of this region for years, and his patient Impressionist recording of the unremarkable Norman countryside had established the principle that subject matter was less important than the quality of observation brought to it. Gauguin's adoption of the same subjects in the same landscape placed him in direct dialogue with his mentor's practice, and the comparison of their treatments of similar subjects is instructive: Pissarro's versions tend toward a more evenly distributed, democratic attention to the whole scene, while Gauguin's already show a slightly more emphatic structural interest in the solid forms of buildings against the landscape. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's collection of early Gauguins, assembled through the broad American collecting of Post-Impressionist work in the twentieth century, preserves an important record of the formative period before his Synthetist breakthrough.

The village lane is rendered with Impressionist directness — varied brushwork recording light on stone walls, tree foliage, and road surface. The palette is fresh and naturalistic, dominated by greens and ochres typical of the Norman countryside in moderate light. Pissarro's influence is clear in both the choice of humble rural subject and the broken brushwork technique.