Waterside Houses

Waterside Houses (1874) at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek is among Gauguin's very earliest canvases, made when he was twenty-six years old and painting as a serious amateur guided by the example of Pissarro and the Impressionist circle he was beginning to join. The houses reflected in water was an Impressionist subject par excellence — it combined the solid architectural form of a building with its fluid, shimmering image in water, testing the painter's ability to render two fundamentally different kinds of visual experience in adjacent areas of the same canvas. Monet had made reflected-water subjects iconic with his series paintings, and Sisley had explored the specific combination of riverside houses and their reflections in his Seine valley canvases. Gauguin's version is competent and formally aware, reflecting his close study of these Impressionist precedents. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek's possession of this early canvas alongside the 1875 Landscape from Viroflay and several Breton-period works documents the full span of his development for Copenhagen audiences.

The reflected forms in the water are handled with varied horizontal strokes suggesting the slight movement of the surface. The solid buildings above are given more structured treatment. The palette of pale ochre and grey-blue is consistent with the overcast northern light of Normandy or Brittany.