In the Henhouse

In the Henhouse dates from Gauguin's Breton period, most likely from one of his stays at Pont-Aven in the mid-to-late 1880s. Gauguin persistently depicted Breton peasant life during these years as an antidote to what he described as the spiritual emptiness of modern Paris. Farm animals and rural labour provided subject matter that carried his primitivist convictions; the raw physicality of barnyard life appealed to his conviction that survival in nature, not bourgeois comfort, was the authentic human condition. The work belongs to a group of small-scale Breton genre studies that he rarely exhibited but used as working-out grounds for compositional and tonal problems.

The handling is relatively loose with an Impressionist touch in the background, while the foreground figures and birds receive more emphatic drawing. The tonality is warm and earthy — ochres, browns, dusty reds — with the confined interior space creating a shallow compositional depth quite unlike his later Pacific works.