Landscape with Poplars

Landscape with Poplars, now at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, dates to 1875 and shows Gauguin's early mastery of the poplar motif that would become emblematic of Impressionist landscape painting — Monet's poplar series being its most famous iteration. At this stage in his career Gauguin was absorbing lessons from Pissarro and the Impressionist movement without yet finding the bold formal simplifications of his mature work. The tall, vertical poplars create a rhythmic structure across the canvas that anticipates the decorative patterning of his later synthetist painting.

The poplars are rendered as tall verticals that break the horizontal recession of the landscape, their foliage applied in rapid, broken touches of varied greens. Gauguin handles the sky between the trees with more open brushwork, creating a play of light through the canopy that is characteristic of plein-air Impressionist technique.