Fan Design: Garden Under Snow

Fan Design: Garden Under Snow (1885) at the Fitzwilliam Museum belongs to a distinctive category of Gauguin's production: the series of fan-shaped paintings he made in the mid-1880s in imitation of the Japanese decorative art form he and his contemporaries were collecting and studying. The Japanese fan painting — with its fan-shaped format, its combination of naturalistic observation and decorative abstraction — was among the most accessible examples of Japanese aesthetic principles for French painters. Gauguin made numerous fan designs during the years before his Pont-Aven breakthrough, using them both as formal exercises in adapting landscape subjects to non-rectangular formats and as potential commercial products. The Garden Under Snow subject transposed his Copenhagen winter experience into the Japanese decorative mode, creating a hybrid that was neither purely European nor purely Japanese. The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, with its broad collections of Western and Asian art, holds this unusual object as evidence of the Japanese influence on French Post-Impressionism.

The fan format requires adaptation of the landscape composition to an arc-shaped ground. The snow-covered garden is rendered with restrained winter colours — white, grey, cool blue — against the tan ground of the fan support. The decorative framing of the composition reflects Japanese fan-painting conventions.