Red Roof by the Water, or Landscape with Red Roof

Red Roof by the Water, or Landscape with Red Roof (c.1885) by Paul Gauguin is one of his transitional Impressionist-Post-Impressionist works, painted during the period when he was beginning to develop his own approach to landscape beyond the Impressionist conventions he had learned from Pissarro. The red roof — a vivid, non-naturalistic color accent in the green and blue landscape — shows Gauguin's instinct for the expressive weight of pure color, an instinct that would define his Synthetist and Tahitian work. The painting is now in the Kunstmuseum Basel.

The landscape is organized around the chromatic punch of the red roof among the greens and blues of water and vegetation. Gauguin's brushwork is broad and confident, with less concern for Impressionist surface fragmentation than for color relationships. The composition is simple and direct, with the red as its visual anchor.