Forest Interior (Sous-Bois)

Forest Interior (Sous-Bois, 1884) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston belongs to Gauguin's early professional period, when he was working within the Impressionist tradition he had absorbed from Pissarro while beginning to seek subjects that went beyond the open landscape and village views of orthodox Impressionism. The dense forest interior was a subject the Barbizon school had explored extensively — Corot's silver forests, Diaz de la Peña's dark undergrowth, Rousseau's ancient oaks — and Gauguin's engagement with the tradition reflected his sustained study of earlier French painting. The forest's enclosed quality — its removal from the open sky and horizon that characterized most Impressionist landscape — created a specific set of formal problems around light penetration, the overlapping of forms, and the spatial recession of depth that his developing technique could address. The MFA's collection of early Gauguins, assembled alongside the more famous Breton and Tahitian works, provides important context for understanding what he was departing from when his Synthetist breakthrough occurred.

The forest is rendered with the Impressionist-influenced handling of the early-to-mid 1880s — varied, responsive brushwork building the dense canopy through layered colour marks. The palette is green-dominated, the light filtering through foliage creating the characteristic dappled effect of woodland painting in the Impressionist tradition. The spatial depth of the forest interior is created through tonal recession rather than flat colour zones.