Landscape with Poplars

Landscape with Poplars (1875) at the Indianapolis Museum of Art belongs to Gauguin's earliest surviving work — painted when he was twenty-seven years old, still employed as a Paris financial agent, and painting under the influence of the Impressionist circle he was beginning to join through his guardian Arosa's connections. Poplar trees along Norman roads and rivers were a standard Impressionist subject, and Gauguin's adoption of the motif placed him firmly within the tradition before he had developed any independent formal voice. The Indianapolis Museum of Art holds this early canvas alongside the 1888 Landscape near Arles, allowing visitors to compare the beginning and the middle period of his career separated by thirteen years of extraordinary transformation. The pairing makes visible the distance between the competent Impressionist amateur of 1875 and the formal innovator of 1888 — one of the most dramatic individual artistic developments in nineteenth-century French painting.

The poplars are rendered as tall verticals that break the horizontal recession of the landscape, their foliage applied in rapid, broken touches of varied greens. Gauguin handles the sky between the trees with more open brushwork, creating a play of light through the canopy that is characteristic of plein-air Impressionist technique.