Landscape in Le Pouldu

Landscape in Le Pouldu (1894) at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art belongs to Gauguin's return visit to Brittany after his first Tahitian stay — a period of difficult readjustment to European life that produced some of his most melancholy and searching canvases. He had left Tahiti in 1893 expecting recognition and commercial success for his Tahitian paintings; instead he found mixed critical response and financial difficulty. Le Pouldu, where he had worked with Paul Sérusier, Jacob Meyer de Haan, and other members of his Pont-Aven circle in 1889-90, offered the familiar consolation of a landscape he had found productive before. But the return visit was colored by a sense of distance from the Brittany he had known: he had been in the Pacific, and the Breton landscape now appeared to him from a different perspective. The Nelson-Atkins Museum's collection of Post-Impressionist work, including this landscape alongside other major Gauguins, reflects the breadth of American institutional collecting of French modernism in the mid-twentieth century.

The landscape is treated with flatter, more Synthetist simplification than his early Impressionist work — the forms of fields and coastline are reduced to bold colour areas bounded by firm contours. Gauguin's palette draws on the rich greens of the Breton coast and the grey-blues of the Atlantic sky. The composition has a quiet, melancholic authority characteristic of his Breton landscapes.