In the Forest, Saint-Cloud I

In the Forest, Saint-Cloud I (c.1873) at the Uehara Museum of Modern Art belongs to Gauguin's very earliest painting years, when the Bois de Saint-Cloud and the royal forest of Saint-Cloud on the western outskirts of Paris were among his accessible outdoor painting sites. The forest of Saint-Cloud had been a popular landscape subject for French painters from the Barbizon school onward — Corot painted there, and the forest's proximity to Paris made it convenient for painters who could not travel to Fontainebleau or Normandy. Gauguin's engagement with this subject placed him firmly within the Impressionist plein-air tradition, and the Saint-Cloud forest scenes are among the most directly derivative of his Impressionist-influenced early work. The Uehara Museum of Modern Art in Shimosuwa, Japan, holds this canvas as part of the Japanese institutional collecting of early Gauguin that developed alongside the broader collection of French Post-Impressionism in Japan.

The forest interior is built from Impressionist broken strokes with a green-dominated palette appropriate to the enclosed woodland setting. Light penetrating through the canopy is rendered with varying touch weights — lighter in the illuminated passages, denser in shadow. The overall handling is competent Impressionism without yet showing the formal distinctiveness of his later work.