The Red Cow

The Red Cow (1889) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was painted in Brittany during the same intensely productive period that produced the Vision after the Sermon and several other landmark Synthetist works. The red color of the cow — arbitrary, non-naturalistic, chosen for formal and expressive rather than descriptive reasons — is the most direct demonstration of the Synthetist principle that color should be freed from its obligation to represent observed reality. In the Vision after the Sermon, he had shown Jacob wrestling the angel against a red ground that represented the spiritual intensity of the Breton women watching the vision; in The Red Cow, the same liberation of color from naturalistic constraint is applied to an animal subject. His colleague in Brittany, Émile Bernard, was making similar moves with color at the same time, and the question of who 'invented' Synthetism was a source of dispute between them. LACMA's possession of this unusually radical early example alongside later Polynesian canvases documents the full development of his color liberation.

The strong vermilion of the cow's coat is set against a complementary green ground with a confident, unmodulated flatness. The animal's form is defined by its colour boundary rather than tonal gradation. The background landscape is handled in broad, flat strokes of green and ochre consistent with Gauguin's Tahitian manner.