Vaches au repos

Gauguin painted cattle at rest during his stay in Brittany and Normandy in the mid-1880s, when his artistic programme was shifting from Impressionist landscape to something more primitive and structurally simplified. Cows — solid, still, close to the earth — were subjects that appealed to his developing interest in mass and silhouette over Impressionist atmospheric dissolution. He had studied the animal painters Rosa Bonheur and Troyon, and his cattle pictures form part of his sustained engagement with rural Brittany as a repository of pre-modern authenticity that he was simultaneously aestheticising and appropriating.

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.