Riders on the Beach (I)

Riders on the Beach (I, 1902) at Museum Folkwang in Essen is among Gauguin's finest late works, painted in the Marquesas with the calm authority of a painter who has fully resolved the formal problems of his mature style. The horseback riders moving laterally across the beach in the evening light create a frieze-like composition that he associated with the processional quality of archaic sculpture — the Parthenon frieze photographs he kept pinned to his studio wall at Hiva Oa were perhaps the most direct source, but Javanese and Egyptian processional reliefs also contributed. Museum Folkwang in Essen, founded by Karl Ernst Osthaus in 1902 as a museum of applied art and modernism, was among the first European museums to acquire works by Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Matisse, making it a pioneering institutional supporter of the Post-Impressionist generation. The museum's early acquisition of several Gauguins from different periods reflects Osthaus's prescient understanding of the movement's historical importance.

The figures and horses are rendered as warm, solid forms moving across the pale sand. The sea and sky provide a horizontal backdrop of blue-grey. The frieze-like lateral movement of the composition recalls Gauguin's consistent reference to archaic sculptural sources. The palette is muted and golden, with a quality of late afternoon light.