In the Forest, Saint-Cloud I

In the Forest, Saint-Cloud was painted during Gauguin's Parisian years, when the royal forest of Saint-Cloud — on the western outskirts of the city — was a favourite outdoor studio for Impressionist landscape painters. Monet and Sisley had both worked there, and Gauguin's engagement with the subject places him squarely within the Impressionist tradition of the early 1880s. By this period he was still primarily a Sunday painter and collector, and the Saint-Cloud forest studies reflect the technical influence of the Impressionist paintings he was accumulating in his apartment.

The forest interior is built from Impressionist broken strokes with a green-dominated palette appropriate to the enclosed woodland setting. Light penetrating through the canopy is rendered with varying touch weights — lighter in the illuminated passages, denser in shadow. The overall handling is competent Impressionism without yet showing the formal distinctiveness of his later work.