Paul Gauguin – L’Aven Below the Montagne Sainte-Marguerite

Paul Gauguin – L’Aven Below the Montagne Sainte-Marguerite – hand-painted oil painting reproduction

The river the town is named after. The canvas was painted in 1888 in Brittany, oil on canvas, and measures 92.2 cm wide by 72.9 cm high — a landscape format. It is held by the Artizon Museum (Ishibashi Foundation) in Tokyo, the museum formerly called the Bridgestone Museum of Art. We paint the scene again by hand: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, oil on canvas, never a print.

Where the painter stood

The museum catalogues its picture simply as Landscape near Pont-Aven, and its own description says where the view is taken from: the woods known as the Bois d’Amour on the outskirts of Pont-Aven, looking across the river Aven to the farm on the far bank. The place-name supplies the rest: pont is a bridge, and Pont-Aven is the bridge on the Aven. Our longer French title describes the same scene from the other side — the river below the Montagne Sainte-Marguerite.

What is on the canvas

A rounded green hill rises across the middle, trees along its crest and a pale track running down its flank. In front stand pollarded willows with thick knotted stumps, and bare poplars beside them. A low stone wall separates the meadow from the slope. In the lower right the Aven runs over shallow, pale-lit rocks. The sky is thin and milky, with no sun in it. At the lower left is the signature, legible on our reproduction: P Gauguin .88.

1888, before the turn

This is Pont-Aven, the village that gave a whole circle of painters its name, and the year in which Gauguin’s painting turned. The turn is not visible here yet: the touch is still broken, and the colour still describes light and damp rather than flat shape. The museum’s own description notes the same thing — traces of Impressionist brushwork in the handling of the river and the hill, while the green meadow and the group of trees already show an interest in the decorative. That is what makes this landscape worth looking at: it catches the painter halfway.

A hand-painted reproduction for your home

Soft greens, greys and ochres make a quiet range; the picture does not compete with the room and holds up on a smaller or poorly lit wall — a hallway, a bedroom, the wall beside a bookcase. The landscape format suits a wide wall. The original measures 72.9 × 92.2 cm; we paint it in eight sizes, which you choose in the selector above this text. From the same Pont-Aven come Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven; two years earlier came Rocks by the Sea, and later Winter Landscape — the same Brittany under snow.

• Subject: L’Aven Below the Montagne Sainte-Marguerite, Paul Gauguin, 1888, Pont-Aven, Brittany
• Technique: hand-painted canvas, oil on canvas, a reproduction — never a print
• Original: oil on canvas, 72.9 × 92.2 cm (height × width, landscape), Artizon Museum (Ishibashi Foundation), Tokyo — formerly the Bridgestone Museum of Art
• Detail worth knowing: the museum lists it as Landscape near Pont-Aven, and the view is taken from the Bois d’Amour across the Aven to the farm opposite