Red Roof by the Water, or Landscape with Red Roof

Red Roof by the Water of c.1885 demonstrates one of Gauguin's developing formal instincts that would become central to his Synthetist method: the use of a single vivid color accent — the red of a roof against the greens and blues of the landscape — as the compositional and emotional keystone of an entire picture. This instinct for the expressive weight of isolated color prefigures both his Tahitian period, where warm ochres and reds carried the whole emotional charge of the tropical subject, and the Cloisonnist method he would codify with Bernard in 1888. The landscape subject was also directly in dialogue with his Impressionist training: Pissarro had painted countless Norman and Île-de-France landscapes with farmhouses and rural architecture, and Gauguin's 1885 version shows both the inheritance of that tradition and the beginning of his departure from it. The Kunstmuseum Basel, which holds this canvas, assembled its French modern collection partly through acquisitions from Parisian dealers in the early twentieth century, when the prices of early Gauguin were still accessible to European institutions outside France.

The landscape is organized around the chromatic punch of the red roof among the greens and blues of water and vegetation. Gauguin's brushwork is broad and confident, with less concern for Impressionist surface fragmentation than for color relationships. The composition is simple and direct, with the red as its visual anchor.