Haystacks in Brittany

Paul Gauguin

Oil on canvas

National Gallery of Art

Painted near Le Pouldu in Brittany, this oil on canvas presents a stylized rural landscape in which a Breton woman and a frieze of black-and-white spotted cows occupy the foreground, while rust-brown haystacks punctuate the middle distance and farm buildings cluster beneath a stratified, topaz-blue sky. The entire composition is organized into horizontal bands, its forms simplified and flattened in accordance with the Synthetist principles Gauguin had been developing alongside Émile Bernard at Pont-Aven — a deliberate rejection of classical perspective and naturalistic color in favor of decorative, expressive arrangement. Strong contrasts of dark and light render the cows and flowering crops more emblematic than descriptive, and the vivid, unexpected oranges in the foreground are drawn from imagination rather than observation. As one of Gauguin's final works executed in Brittany before his departure for Tahiti, the painting stands as a fully realized example of his Synthetist maturity, bridging his European pastoral subjects and the bolder chromatic experiments that would define his Polynesian period.