The Quarries of Le Chou near Pontoise by Gauguin

THE STORY BEHIND GAUGUIN'S PAINTING

Gauguin did not receive a traditional artist’s training, and critical to his development was working alongside experienced and thoughtful painters such as Pissarro and Cézanne. In the summer of 1882, the three artists spent time together in the provincial town of Pontoise where Pissarro lived, a short train ride from Paris.

This painting certainly shows the influence of Pissarro, the more experienced of the three and famously generous and supportive of younger artists. The use of hatched strokes that flow over form, and are interwoven to depict foliage is clearly inspired by Pissaro’s example. However, Gauguin distinguishes himself with a deliberate rhythm of strokes, intervals of vibrant tints, and a tension that is due to the slightly unbalanced the composition.

The painting was one of a pair of identically sized paintings of the same scene, made at the same time; a practice Gauguin was experimenting with at the time. Both Monet and Pissarro undertook similar experiments – most famously Monet painted the same scenes multiple times at different times of the day, resulting in series of paintings. With Gauguin however the process is subtly and characteristically different; the versions are arrived at after multiple sessions of painting, the surfaces worked and reworked to build up a richness of effect, sometimes at odds with the depiction of a perceptual effect.  

This brings about a degree of abstraction, where elements of the surface are approached almost purely decoratively – the interlaced strokes of different colors being beautiful in themselves, quite separate from the form they depict. This considered build-up is seen well in this painting and looks very close to how Gauguin would have left it.