The Green Christ

The Green Christ, painted in 1889 and held at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, depicts a Breton calvary—one of the roadside stone crucifixes common to the Brittany countryside—with peasant women kneeling at its base. The greenish hue of the stone Christ gives the image its cold, archaic quality; Gauguin was fascinated by the way these weathered calvaries compressed suffering into simplified, non-naturalistic form. The painting is a key document of his move away from Impressionism toward a consciously primitivizing synthesis.

The stone crucifix and surrounding figures are rendered with minimal modulation of tone, their surfaces described in areas of muted green, grey, and sienna. The compressed, flattened treatment of the stone Christ contrasts with the slightly warmer, more varied handling of the surrounding Breton peasant women, distinguishing sacred image from contemporary devotee.