The Wave

The Wave (1888) in a private collection belongs to the period of Gauguin's most intensive Synthetist experimentation at Pont-Aven and the Atlantic coast of Brittany. Japanese woodblock prints had been circulating among French artists since the 1860s, and their influence on the treatment of water as an abstract pattern of curving forms rather than a specific optical observation was particularly significant for the Pont-Aven painters. Hokusai's Great Wave was widely reproduced and discussed, and Gauguin's decision to treat a Breton sea wave through bold, simplified color zones and curving rhythmic forms reflects this Japanese influence being absorbed into his developing Cloisonnist vocabulary. The wave was also a subject that naturally resisted conventional illusionistic representation — its form was constituted by movement and rhythm rather than stable geometric structure — making it an appropriate testing ground for the flat, patterned approach he was developing. The work's private collection status means it appears in the public record primarily through exhibition history rather than permanent museum documentation.

Gauguin renders the wave as an almost abstract arrangement of curved colour zones—deep blue-green, white foam, dark trough—suppressing specific detail in favour of rhythmic pattern. The simplified drawing and flat zones anticipate his fully developed Synthetist treatment of landscape.