Coast at Dieppe

Gauguin's Coast at Dieppe was painted around 1885, when he spent a summer holiday on the Normandy coast after his financial collapse had forced him to take his family to Rouen and then Copenhagen. The painting belongs to his most explicitly Impressionist period, showing the direct influence of Monet's Normandy seascapes that he had studied in Parisian collections. By 1885, however, the crisis that would push him toward Pont-Aven and eventually Polynesia was already building, and the coastal landscape has a stability and calm that reads against the grain of the personal turmoil surrounding it.

The cliff and beach are rendered in high-keyed colour with Impressionist broken touch. The water is built from horizontal strokes of blue-green and white. The handling is fluent and technically accomplished within the Impressionist idiom, with the sky providing a particularly airy range of blues and creams.