Houses at Vaugirard

Houses at Vaugirard (1880) at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem is an early canvas from Gauguin's period of transition from committed amateur to aspiring professional painter. Vaugirard was a working-class district in southern Paris — one of the less fashionable quarters of the city, home to artisans and small manufacturers — and Gauguin's choice of it as a subject reflects the Impressionist principle that any corner of contemporary life was worthy of serious pictorial attention. He had been exhibiting with the Impressionist group since the 1879 show, where Pissarro had arranged his inclusion, and by 1880 he was working with growing technical confidence. The Israel Museum's collection of European modernism, assembled through generous international donations, holds this early Gauguin as documentation of the formative years before his distinctive identity as an artist had emerged. Comparing this modest urban landscape with the Tahitian and Marquesan works of his mature years makes visible the extraordinary distance he traveled in the twenty years between.

The handling is Impressionist in approach — loose, responsive brushwork recording the light on buildings and street. The palette is appropriately urban and muted, the grey-beige tones of Parisian buildings rendered with varied atmospheric strokes. The composition has a quiet, documentary quality that reflects Gauguin's Impressionist training rather than anticipating his later bold primitivism.