Landscape with Curtain of Trees

Landscape with Curtain of Trees (1875) belongs to Gauguin's earliest painting years, when he was a committed amateur working in his spare time from his position at the Bertin brokerage house. The curtain of trees as a compositional device — trees lined up in parallel across the picture plane, screening a lighter distance — was one of the most classic landscape formulas in French painting from the Barbizon school, and Gauguin's adoption of it placed him firmly within the tradition his Impressionist mentors were both inheriting and transforming. Corot above all had made the screened landscape — the silvery distance glimpsed through a foreground of trees — into something distinctly French, and Gauguin's early landscape belongs to this tradition without yet having absorbed the Impressionist transformation of it that Pissarro and Monet were effecting in the same years. The work's unknown current location and its survival only in reproduction reflects the modest market value of Gauguin's very earliest canvases before his mature reputation was established.

Gauguin handles the tree curtain with Impressionist broken brushwork, differentiating foliage through colour variation and stroke direction. The composition follows a standard Barbizon template — trees screening a brighter distance — and the palette, while fresh, remains within the naturalistic range of his contemporaries.