Landscape near Pont-Aven

Landscape near Pont-Aven (1888) at the Artizon Museum in Tokyo is a characteristic example of Gauguin's mature Breton landscape work from the breakthrough year when he was developing Synthetism alongside Émile Bernard. The rolling Pont-Aven countryside — with its stone walls, Breton farmhouses, and characteristic vegetation — had been his primary landscape subject for two years, and by 1888 he was treating it with the full authority of a painter who had found both his subject and his formal language simultaneously. The flat color zones, the reduced atmospheric recession, the bold simplification of natural forms — all demonstrated in this landscape — were the formal principles that would be applied to Polynesian subjects three years later. The Artizon Museum in Tokyo, which also holds significant Cézanne works including the Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir and the Bathers at Rest, holds this landscape as one of its major Post-Impressionist canvases from the generation that defined painting's path into the twentieth century.

Gauguin applied paint in broad, flat areas of strong color bounded by firm contour lines — a technique he called Synthetism, derived partly from medieval stained glass and Japanese prints. His palette is deliberately non-naturalistic, using vivid magentas, ochres.