Landscape from Viroflay

Landscape from Viroflay (1875) at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen documents Gauguin's very first years as a painter, before Pissarro had formally become his teacher and while he was still employed at the Bertin brokerage house. Viroflay, in the southwestern suburbs of Paris near Versailles, was one of the accessible countryside areas where Parisian painters could work outdoors without major travel. His guardian Gustave Arosa had introduced him to the Impressionist circle and to Pissarro specifically, and by 1875 Gauguin was absorbing the lessons of the plein-air approach with the attentiveness of a serious student. The suburban Paris landscape around Viroflay was not the most inspiring of subjects, and his choice of it reflects the Impressionist principle that any piece of contemporary landscape, however unremarkable, could sustain serious painting. The Glyptotek's possession of this early canvas reflects the Scandinavian collecting of Gauguin motivated partly by his Danish connections through his wife Mette.

The landscape is painted with competent Impressionist directness, the foliage handled in short, varied strokes that separate individual trees from the general green mass. Gauguin captures the flat quality of suburban Parisian light — diffuse, without the dramatic shadows of his later Brittany or Polynesian scenes.