Harvest: Le Pouldu
- Artist: Paul Gauguin
- Date: 1890
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Museum: The National Gallery
- Collection record: The National Gallery website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is "Harvest: Le Pouldu" by Paul Gauguin. Painted in 1890, it's a quintessential example of Gauguin's Synthetist style. You can see how he's broken down the landscape into flat areas of colour and defined forms.
Gauguin was actually staying at a boarding house in Le Pouldu, Brittany when he painted this work. The headland you see here is located just outside the village, about a mile from where Gauguin would have been living. He also depicted this scene in other paintings, always emphasizing the characteristic flatness of colour and strong forms.
The brushstrokes are quite loose and expressive, don't you think? And the colours he's used are really rich and vibrant. This was actually one of his experiments with simplifying landscapes to create a more symbolic effect.
See it in person
Harvest: Le Pouldu hangs in The National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
