Description
Paul Gauguin – Rocks by the Sea – hand-painted oil painting reproduction
An ochre cliff rises at the right edge of the canvas, close enough to put the viewer on the shore rather than in front of it. A dark islet lies far off to the left, and between them the sea runs deep blue. This is Gauguin’s coastal scene of 1886, painted in Brittany.
What is on the canvas
The sky is a pale creamy pink, laid down in short broken strokes that visibly cross one another. Below it the sea is deep blue, turning greenish as it nears the shore. White foam breaks over dark rocks in the middle distance, a sandy beach runs across the foreground, and the cliff at the right rises in ochre and violet. The islet on the left closes the view. The painting is landscape in format: 92 cm wide and 71 cm high.
1886, before the turn
The work dates from 1886, during Gauguin’s first stay at Pont-Aven. This is Gauguin before Synthetism: the touch is still Impressionist and broken, the colour not yet closed into flat areas with a dark contour, as he would paint a few years later. That is exactly what makes the canvas a valuable marker – it shows the painter just before he turned onto his own road. The original is oil on canvas and belongs to Göteborgs konstmuseum, the city art museum of Gothenburg in Sweden.
The Galerie Druet label and the road to Gothenburg
The stretcher frame of the original carries a label from the Paris Galerie Druet reading “Galerie Druet 4740 Gauguin Marine 71 x 92”; the label gives the measurement the other way round, height first. That is the road the picture travelled north – from Druet’s gallery to the exhibition of French art held in Gothenburg in 1918, where the museum bought it. In 1954 it was shown at the Liljevalchs Konsthall in Stockholm in De Cézanne à Picasso. The catalogue describes the original as signed at the lower right. The measurement 92 × 71 cm rests on a single source, the Wildenstein catalogue of Gauguin’s work, as the museum’s own collection database could not be reached electronically while this text was written.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
Our painter paints the picture 100 % by hand, in oil on canvas. With this motif that matters especially: the broken sky and the foam on the rocks live off many short strokes, which a flat printed surface smooths away. Before delivery you receive a photograph of the finished painting for approval. We paint it in eight sizes; 92 × 71 cm is exactly the size of the original, while for a larger wall 130 × 100 cm is a frequent choice. You can also choose the frame and the stretcher frame. If Brittany of these same years interests you, see also L’Aven Below the Montagne Sainte-Marguerite and Winter Landscape, and among the figure subjects Breton Boy. Painting to order takes 15–45 working days.
- Subject: Rocks by the Sea, Paul Gauguin, 1886, Brittany
- Technique: hand-painted canvas, oil on canvas, a reproduction – never a print
- Original: oil on canvas, 92 × 71 cm (width × height, landscape), Göteborgs konstmuseum, Gothenburg
- Detail worth knowing: the stretcher frame carries a Galerie Druet label, and the museum bought the picture at an exhibition of French art in 1918
