The Wave

Painted in 1888 during or shortly after Gauguin's stay at Pont-Aven, this wave study reflects his engagement with the drama of the Breton coastline. In the same year he was in intense correspondence with Emile Bernard and developing cloisonnism, and the sea—with its natural abstraction of repeated forms—was an obvious testing ground for the flattened, patterned treatment he was evolving. Japanese woodblock prints, particularly Hokusai's Great Wave, were circulating widely among the Pont-Aven painters and influenced their approach to water as pure form and rhythm. The work is now in a private collection.

Gauguin renders the wave as an almost abstract arrangement of curved colour zones—deep blue-green, white foam, dark trough—suppressing specific detail in favour of rhythmic pattern. The simplified drawing and flat zones anticipate his fully developed Synthetist treatment of landscape.