Coastal Landscape from Martinique

Gauguin travelled to Martinique in 1887, spending several months on the French Caribbean island before his first Tahitian departure, and this coastal landscape is among the works produced there. Martinique was a decisive transition in his development: for the first time he experienced tropical light, vegetation, and an Afro-Caribbean population that confirmed his conviction that the future of painting lay outside Europe. The Martinique paintings are less stylistically developed than the Tahitian works but show the same instinct for formal simplification triggered by a non-European visual environment.

The tropical vegetation is rendered in dense, rich greens that overwhelm the composition in a way impossible in Breton or Norman landscape. The coastal setting provides a horizontal blue distance against the foreground weight of the foliage. Handling is more Impressionistic than the later Tahitian work but shows the Cézannesque structural influence already present.