Martinican Meadow

Gauguin's Martinican Meadow of 1887 is a landscape subject from his four-month Caribbean period — the tropical grassland and vegetation of Martinique rendered with the energized color response that the intense Caribbean light provoked in his Impressionist-trained eye. The meadow subject was entirely familiar from his French landscape work, but the Caribbean meadow was visually transformed by tropical sunlight and vegetation: different species, different light quality, different atmospheric conditions. His Martinique landscapes show a painter discovering that a familiar subject category could yield entirely new pictorial possibilities when the environment was radically changed. The color responses he developed on Martinique — warmer, more saturated, pushed toward intensity by the actual qualities of tropical light — would feed directly into the formal evolution of his Synthetist period, giving his Breton work after 1887 a chromatic boldness that his pre-Martinique canvases lacked. This Caribbean meadow, overlooked by comparison with his Martinique figure subjects, was a crucial step in the development of his mature palette.

Gauguin renders the Martinican meadow with the energized color response that the tropical light provoked in him — the specific greens of the Caribbean vegetation under intense tropical sun, the quality of the light and shadow in the landscape, and the particular atmosphere of the island giving the familiar meadow subject a new visual character. His brushwork in the Martinique landscapes shows his Impressionist foundation energized by the unfamiliarity of the subject, the observed colors pushed toward intensity by the light's actual qualities.