Garden in Snow

Garden in Snow (c.1884-85) at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek was painted during Gauguin's miserable Copenhagen winter, when he was living in his wife's home city, unable to sell paintings, linguistically isolated, and artistically frustrated. He had moved the family to Copenhagen in the fall of 1884 after the failure of his attempts to establish himself in France following the banking crisis of 1882, and the Danish winter was everything his artistic temperament found hostile: grey, cold, socially conventional, artistically conservative. The snow-covered garden — probably the courtyard or garden visible from the family's Copenhagen apartment — was the nearest available landscape subject, and his treatment of it is characteristically unromantic: a compositional exercise in tonal restraint rather than a celebration of winter's beauty. He returned to Paris alone in the summer of 1885, effectively abandoning his family, and his departure marked the beginning of the definitive artistic career that would lead through Brittany to the Pacific. The Glyptotek's possession of this canvas alongside the 1875 Landscape from Viroflay documents the full arc of his early development.

The snow-covered garden is rendered with a restricted palette of white, grey, and pale blue, with dark bare branches providing the primary linear structure. The handling is relatively quiet and systematic, lacking the boldness of the Brittany and Polynesian work. The spatial organisation is straightforward, with the garden seen from above at a mild angle.