The Road

The Road (1884) at the Kunsthaus Zürich belongs to Gauguin's early professional period, when he was working in the Impressionist style he had absorbed under Pissarro's tutelage. By 1884 he had been exhibiting with the Impressionist group since 1879 and had built a solid technical foundation in plein-air landscape painting. A rural road or lane was among the most classic of Impressionist subjects — Claude Monet had made roads and paths central motifs in the late 1860s and 1870s, and Pissarro's Pontoise paintings were full of country lanes and village streets. Gauguin's version is competent and observant, the Impressionist vocabulary applied with confidence to a subject that held no special personal or formal significance for him at this date. The Kunsthaus Zürich's early Gauguins — including this road painting and other canvases from the 1880s — allow the institution's visitors to trace his development from conventional Impressionist landscape to the radical Synthetist and Polynesian work of his mature years.

The handling is impressionistic — broken, varied brushstrokes record light on the road surface and flanking vegetation. The palette is light and naturalistic, responsive to observed conditions. The composition has a simple, direct quality characteristic of Impressionist plein air work, without the symbolic weight or formal boldness of Gauguin's mature style.