Schooner and Three-Master

Gauguin's Schooner and Three-Master of 1886 places him within the French marine painting tradition at a moment when he was still developing his distinctive formal language. Dieppe and the Breton coast had strong associations with marine painting — Boudin had spent his career on the Normandy coast, Monet had painted the Étretat cliffs repeatedly, and the tradition of French seascape stretched back through Vernet to the Dutch marine paintings that had originally inspired it. The specific vessels named in the title — the two-masted schooner and the larger three-master — were the working sail of the Breton and Norman coast, and Gauguin's attention to the specific rigging and scale of each vessel shows the interest in accurate maritime observation that would become more obviously transformed in his later coastal subjects. By 1886 he was beginning to find landscape and marine subjects insufficient unless they could carry the formal ambitions and symbolic dimensions he was increasingly convinced painting must express, and his Breton marine canvases document the moment before that dissatisfaction produced the radical departures of his 1887-88 development.

Gauguin renders the sailing vessels with the directness and technical interest that characterized his marine subjects — the specific rigging, hull forms, and relative scale of the two vessels creating the composition's formal interest. His handling of the sea and sky that contextualizes the vessels reflects his developing approach to the natural elements. The vessels in the composition create the organizing structure around which the marine atmosphere is built.