Paul Gauguin, 'Harvest: Le Pouldu', 1890

This painting was considered to be highly radical when Paul Gauguin made it in 1890. We are familiar with artists simplifying forms and using ‘unnatural’ colours to evoke their response to what they see. That was not the case then. Gauguin was experimenting with a new way of simplifying his art and expressing his emotions through strong colour contrasts. This approach is known as Synthetism. He reduced the cut corn, the fields, cliffs and stone walls to blocks of purple, green and yellow. The thin strip of sky is a dirty white and there is a strange bright red dog in the foreground. A strong diagonal runs across the painting, receding into the middle distance. The sense of a long perspective is also enhanced by the diminishing size of the figures, the tiny cows in the distance and the sailing boats out in the bay. However, our eye is drawn very directly to the red dog. It seems to stand guard over a lunch basket and a discarded cape or jacket presumably belonging to one of the women gathering the corn. The women are bent double and are absorbed in their work. The dog has a slightly sinister yellow eye. It is a troubling presence, apparently alert to something we cannot see.

Gauguin leaves the mystery unsolved, but it was a favourite motif of his. The dog’s head is turned back over its shoulder. The posture may derive from a painting of a dog by Gustave Courbet that Gauguin knew. The dog appears in other pictures, including Faa Iheihe, made by Gauguin eight years later in Tahiti.

If the dog existed in Gauguin’s imagination, the landscape itself is clearly identifiable. He spent the summer of 1890 in the little resort of Le Pouldu. He came to Brittany to try to escape from the suffocating atmosphere of Paris. ‘Give me the country. I love Brittany: I find the wild and the primitive here. When my clogs resonate on this granite ground, I hear the muffled and powerful thud that I’m looking for in painting’, he wrote. Most of his visits were to the nearby bustling town of Pont Aven. There, he was the central figure among a group of artists who were experimenting with the Synthetist style. But the move to Le Pouldu seems to have been an attempt to escape even further from the life of the West.

Gauguin may have walked up onto the high promontory above the resort to paint this landscape. The headland at the centre of the painting marks the western end of Le Pouldu beach. The land seen on the horizon is either the other side of the bay, or possibly the island of Groix. Gauguin painted other versions of this landscape, all of which are characterised by the strongly defined forms and flat areas of colour of his Synthetist style.