Clearing II

Gauguin's Clearing II belongs to the series of Breton landscape studies he produced during his multiple visits to Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu in the late 1880s. As he and Émile Bernard developed the Synthetist approach — broad flat areas of colour, simplified contour, rejection of Impressionist atmospheric shimmer — the Breton forest clearings provided a subject that tested these principles against the complexity of natural light in wooded space. The clearings in particular, with their alternation of dense shade and brilliant patches of light, required a simplifying formal decision that Impressionist notation could not supply.

The clearing is defined by the strong tonal contrast between the dark surrounding forest and the lighter, warmer ground plane. The handling is more deliberate than the Impressionist forest studies, with clearly separated colour zones. The trees frame the composition without Impressionist dissolution of their edges.