Landscape with Three Figures

Landscape with Three Figures (1901) at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh belongs to the first year of Gauguin's Marquesas period, when he was establishing his studio on Hiva Oa and adjusting to an environment even more remote from Europe than Tahiti. His formal language for Polynesian subjects was by this date fully mature, and the three-figure landscape composition — with its flat color zones, firm outlines, and the integration of figures and landscape into a unified decorative surface — was produced with the authority of a painter who had been refining this specific approach for a decade. The Carnegie Museum of Art's collection of Post-Impressionist work, assembled through the museum's historical strength in European art, includes this late Gauguin alongside significant works from his Synthetist Breton period and the middle Tahitian years, providing American viewers with a survey of his development across three of his major phases.

The figures are rendered with the bold, simplified outlines of Synthetism, their bodies integrated into the landscape through colour rhyming rather than spatial recession. Gauguin's characteristic rich earth tones—ochre, sienna, deep green—unify figures and ground into a single decorative plane.