The Haystacks

Paul Gauguin's 'The Haystacks' (1889) belongs to his later Pont-Aven period, following his Caribbean journey to Martinique and his pivotal collaboration with Van Gogh in Arles. By 1889 his Synthetist aesthetic was fully formed — bold outlines, simplified color, a rejection of the shimmering opacity of Impressionism in favor of clear, legible form and expressive rather than descriptive color. The haystack subject, familiar from Monet's concurrent investigation of the same motif, receives from Gauguin a very different treatment: less a study of light's transformation of the subject than a statement about form, weight, and color as autonomous pictorial values.

Gauguin's haystacks are rendered with the flat, outlined clarity of his mature Synthetist approach — forms defined with bold contours enclosing areas of relatively unmodulated color. The rejection of Impressionist atmospheric dissolution is total: each element is legible and structurally distinct. His palette is richer and less naturalistic than Monet's version of the same subject, the colors chosen for emotional resonance rather than optical accuracy.