Description
| Year: | 1890 |
| Original size: | 40.6 cm x 32.75 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (primitivism), post-impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, United Kingdom |
Toll Gate – a hand-painted reproduction
An upright scene dominated by green. The upper third is a pale grey sky with soft white
and grey cloud. Down the right edge runs a row of tall dark green trees with pale trunks,
receding into the distance. In the middle distance two tall slender pale grey chimneys, their
surfaces speckled, rise from a low building with a broad ochre pitched roof, with massed dark
green trees around them; at the upper left a green wooded slope carries a pale building with
a small dark finial. Across the centre stands a tall black iron gate with gold spearhead
tips, closed, a small white plate fixed to it. To its left a brick pier of warm reddish-brown
with a pale stone coping forms the gateway, and beside it a pale glass-roofed structure sits
behind more gold-tipped railing. Two ornate standards carry glass lanterns. In the gateway
stands a man in a dark coat with a pale collar and a dark bowler hat, his right arm extended,
holding a thin pale rod. Above and to the left, on a pale ledge, a second man stands seen
from behind in a dark coat and cap, a thin cane at his side. Four short pale stone bollards
stand on the pale roadway, and to the right of the gate a dark cart under a grey-green cover.
The foreground is pale road and a band of green grass.
A gate that is shut
The scene is built around a barrier. The iron gate stands closed across the way, the
bollards measure the passage, and the man with the outstretched arm stands exactly where
someone would enter. What is being transacted here we do not claim – the record says nothing
about it, and a dark coat is not evidence of an office. The painting indicates a duty and
leaves it open. A related boundary, this time with no gate and nobody at it, is View of the Fortifications to the Left of the Gate of Vanves.
The city ends among trees
Behind the barrier no square opens, only an avenue and two chimneys. That mixture –
wrought railing, lamp standards, woodland and a factory at the same depth – is the motif that
returns in this group at Outskirts of Paris and at Sawmill, Outskirts of Paris, where the fringe is painted more industrially and
less like a garden. Together they show the city’s edge as a place where order and greenery
meet without a verdict.
What it means on the wall
The original measures 40.6 cm x 32.75 cm and is upright. Because the scene leads the eye
upward through trees and chimneys, it carries tall sizes naturally; at small sizes the gold
tips of the railing, the plate on the gate and both figures collapse into dots. We do not
reproduce canvases at the original measurement; you choose the size for your wall. For the
opposite case, a wide scene of empty sky and open water, see The Eiffel Tower.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every canvas is painted by hand in oils, to order, in the size you choose. The painter
works from a high-resolution photograph of the original, layer by layer, so that the gold
tips of the railing, the glass lanterns and both figures stay legible at smaller sizes too.
Because this is hand work, two canvases of the same size always differ slightly; that is not
a fault but the difference between a painting and a print. Prices on this page start at
155 EUR for the smallest size.
