Landscape from Pont-Aven, Brittany

Painted in 1888 at Pont-Aven during one of the most artistically charged periods of his early career, this landscape documents Gauguin's deep engagement with the Breton countryside. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen holds this canvas as part of its strong collection of Gauguin's Breton work. The Pont-Aven landscape — with its rolling fields, characteristic stone walls, and ancient vegetation — provided Gauguin with a pictorial world that he transformed through Synthetist simplification into something between documentary observation and symbolic mythology.

The landscape is treated with developing Synthetist boldness — the fields and hedgerows rendered in flat colour zones bounded by firmer contours than his early Impressionist work. The palette is rich and saturated, the greens particularly vivid. The composition is direct and unhesitating, demonstrating the confidence Gauguin had achieved in Pont-Aven during the summer of 1888.