Tahitian Women on the Beach
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
The Yellow Christ, Paul Gauguin, 1889. Oil on canvas, 92.1 × 73.3 cm. Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Post-Impressionism
The Yellow Christ
Paul Gauguin · 1889
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 92.1 × 73.3 cm
- Held by
- Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
- Country
- France
The painter
Paul Gauguin
Gauguin was a successful Paris stockbroker who collected Impressionist paintings before he made any, and who gave up the career at thirty-five to paint full-time — leaving a wife and five children in Copenhagen in the process. The work that matters begins in Brittany, where from 1886 he developed with Émile Bernard a way of painting in flat areas of unmodulated colour bounded by heavy contours, borrowed in part from cloisonné enamel and Japanese prints. He spent nine weeks living with Van Gogh in Arles in 1888, which ended badly and permanently.
Nearby
Related works
Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The Potato Eaters
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
What to look at
Gauguin took a real object as his starting point: a polychrome wooden crucifix in the chapel at Trémalo, near Pont-Aven, which is still there and is still that pale yellow. He then put it outdoors in a Breton field in autumn, surrounded by three women in local dress who are not mourning so much as waiting, with the harvest going on behind them. The effect is to collapse the first century into the nineteenth without any visible seam, which is a claim about how faith worked in that community rather than a historical scene. Formally it is his cloisonnist method at full strength — flat colour, dark outline, no modelling to speak of — and the colour is organised as a single chord: the yellow of the body, the yellow-ochre of the fields, the orange of the turning trees, with the blue-black of the women's clothes as the only cold note.