The Goose

Gauguin's 1889 painting of a goose belongs to the domestic animal subjects that punctuate his Breton work — the farmyard creatures of the Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu countryside depicted with the same formal attention he gave to human figures and grand landscapes. The goose had already appeared in one of his most admired early paintings, The Breton Shepherdess of 1886, where the geese provided both narrative context and compositional elements in a composition that attracted Degas's admiring attention. His return to the subject in 1889, now a solitary goose treated as a monographic subject, shows his willingness to apply the full rigor of his Synthetist method to the humblest rural animal. This mirrors the Japanese printmaking tradition he admired — Hiroshige and Hokusai had made single animals and birds into sufficient subjects for images of great formal distinction — and the goose painting demonstrates how thoroughly he had absorbed that lesson about the sufficiency of the apparently simple subject when approached with sufficient formal intelligence and cultural conviction.

Gauguin renders the goose with his characteristic bold outline and simplified color — the animal's white plumage and orange bill treated as formal elements in a deliberate compositional arrangement rather than casual observation. The setting is handled with equivalent simplification, the ground and environment organized for their contribution to the overall surface rather than their naturalistic completeness.