Vaches au repos

Vaches au repos (Cattle at Rest, 1885) at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen belongs to the group of animal subjects Gauguin painted in Brittany and Normandy as he was developing his more primitive, structurally simplified approach to rural subjects. His engagement with cattle as pictorial subjects placed him in a tradition that ran from the Dutch and Flemish animal painters through the Barbizon school: Troyon's and Bonheur's monumental cattle paintings had been enormously popular in mid-nineteenth-century France, and Gauguin had studied these works. His own cattle are treated quite differently — without the documentary or sentimental specificity of those earlier painters — but the subject's roots in a tradition of agricultural observation gave it a kind of authenticity within his project of finding alternatives to cosmopolitan Parisian painting. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, with its strong Flemish and Dutch holdings alongside this French Post-Impressionist canvas, provides an institutional context that makes the genealogical connection between Gauguin's cattle and the northern European animal painting tradition visible.

The cattle forms are rendered with an emphasis on solid, rounded volumes against the flat plane of the meadow. The palette is greener and cooler than the Brittany coastal subjects. Brushwork is broad and confident, with less surface texture than in the Impressionist period.