Description
Paul Gauguin – Winter Landscape (Vinterlandskap) – hand-painted oil painting reproduction
Two Gauguin winter pictures are easily mistaken for one another; this one is Swedish. The canvas you are looking at is catalogued by its owner as Vinterlandskap – Winter Landscape. It was painted in 1888, oil on canvas, 72.5 × 92 cm (height × width, so a horizontal format), and it is held by the Gothenburg Museum of Art in Sweden under inventory number F 29. Here that snow is made again under the brush: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, oil on canvas, with no printing.
What is on the canvas, and what is not
A village lies under snow: a large dark slate roof with a white patch in the middle, a pale thatched roof beside it, stone gables, a row of chimneys. Behind them a snow-covered slope rises, crossed by a path the painter drew as two blue lines; two bare poplars stand at the left and a haystack sits at the lower left. There is no steeple. In the lower right corner is the signature “P Gauguin” and beside it a year, which the museum record reads as 88. Nothing here is narrative – the picture is built from three planes: snow, roof and sky.
How it reached Gothenburg
The canvas travelled north by a single route. It was collected by Pontus and Göthilda Fürstenberg, a Gothenburg couple who in the 1880s and 1890s assembled one of the largest private collections in Scandinavia. After Pontus’s death the collection passed to the city museum in 1902, and the painting has been there ever since. That is why a Gauguin winter landscape hangs today in Sweden rather than in France.
Two snow-covered villages, two different pictures
The name “Breton Village in the Snow” belongs to a different Gauguin: painted around 1894, measuring 87 × 62 cm, held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, carrying a red church steeple at its centre, and found on the easel in his studio after his death. That is not this picture. The dividing line is simple: the Paris canvas has a steeple and belongs to the 1890s, the Gothenburg one has no steeple and is dated 1888. It is the Gothenburg picture that we paint.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
The field of snow and the low, wide format make this a canvas for a quiet wall – a hallway, a bedroom, a room where nothing should happen. We paint it in eight sizes, chosen in the selector above this text; the original measures 72.5 × 92 cm. From the same year of 1888 come Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven – the same countryside, but in summer and with people in it; Breton Eve follows a year later and is likewise not an oil but a sheet of paper, and The Green Christ shows the same country in a religious subject.
- Subject: Winter Landscape (Vinterlandskap), Paul Gauguin, 1888
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas – never printed
- Original: oil on canvas, 72.5 × 92 cm, Gothenburg Museum of Art, inv. F 29, Fürstenberg collection
- Interesting fact: “Breton Village in the Snow” is the title of a different Gauguin – the 1894 canvas in the Musée d’Orsay, the one with the red steeple
