Watering Trough

Watering Trough (1886) at the Shimane Art Museum in Japan belongs to Gauguin's Breton period, when the functional objects of rural agricultural life — water troughs, stone walls, farm gates — provided him with the physical evidence of a pre-modern peasant culture he was simultaneously observing and romanticizing. His first extended Pont-Aven visit in 1886 was a direct response to the limitations he felt in Parisian painting culture: he sought in Brittany the authenticity and primitivism that he would later pursue to their logical conclusion in the Pacific. The watering trough, where farm animals gathered in the daily rhythms of agricultural life, was a subject at the opposite extreme from the fashionable modernity of Impressionist Paris, and Gauguin's treatment of it as a serious subject for painting was part of his deliberate rejection of metropolitan values. The Shimane Art Museum's collection of French Post-Impressionism reflects the broad distribution of Gauguin's minor works across Japanese regional museums through the collecting activity of the mid-twentieth century.

The trough is treated as a formal element — a horizontal plane of reflective water within the landscape. The surrounding farmyard or field is handled with Impressionist surface treatment. The palette is restrained and naturalistic for this transitional period of Gauguin's development.