The ford

The ford — a shallow river crossing navigable on foot or horseback — is depicted by Gauguin as a scene from Polynesian daily life, with figures and animals crossing or waiting at the water's edge in the lush landscape of the Marquesas. In his final years Gauguin increasingly depicted the ordinary activities of Polynesian life — bathing, walking, fishing, crossing rivers — infusing them with a mythological depth that he felt was absent from the commercialized and Christianized Polynesia he had found. The ford as subject evokes both the practical rhythms of island life and a sense of threshold — of crossing from one state to another — that resonated with Gauguin's broader Symbolist concerns. The Pushkin Museum holds this alongside Still Life with Parrots as part of its significant Gauguin collection.

Gauguin simplifies the landscape into broad planes of saturated color — the water's blue-green, the bank's warm earth, the foliage's deep green — with figures and animals placed as flat silhouettes against these color fields. The composition has the character of a Polynesian frieze rather than a Western landscape.