The Gate

Paul Gauguin's 'The Gate' (1889) is a Breton landscape with architectural element — the gate as a boundary between spaces, between the enclosed and the open, between the cultivated and the wild, carrying the symbolic weight that Gauguin increasingly attached to ordinary landscape features in his post-Arles Brittany period. The gate subject in Breton painting connected to the specific vocabulary of Breton rural life — the stone walls and heavy farm gates that organized the Breton agricultural landscape — while allowing him to explore questions of threshold and transition that interested him at the deepest level.

Gauguin renders the gate with his mature Synthetist approach — the architectural feature's geometric form simplified and integrated within the simplified landscape through his characteristic combination of outline and flat color. The gate's relationship to the landscape on either side creates the compositional structure. His handling of the Breton stone and the surrounding vegetation reflects the directness of his best 1889 work, the formal simplification now fully confident and expressive.