Description
Paul Gauguin – The Market Gardens of Vaugirard – hand-painted oil painting reproduction
Paris, not Tahiti. This canvas was painted in 1879 – fourteen years before Gauguin first sailed for Tahiti and almost a decade before Pont-Aven. Oil on canvas, 66 × 100.3 cm (height × width, a landscape format), today in the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts. We paint the scene again by hand: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, oil on canvas, never a print. In the museum the work carries accession number 1953:55.
Early Gauguin, before he became Gauguin
In 1879 Gauguin was not yet the painter we know him as. Brittany was almost a decade away, Tahiti fourteen years. The Market Gardens of Vaugirard is therefore an Impressionist landscape: a clouded sky with no sun in it, soft transitions, densely packed brushstrokes that keep the vegetable beds clearly apart from the wall and the roofs. No flat colour, no Symbolist simplification – those arrive only after 1887, when his manner begins to turn away from Impressionism.
A quarter caught mid-change
Vaugirard was an independent commune outside Paris until the city absorbed it in 1860; today it lies in the 15th arrondissement. When Gauguin painted this scene the quarter had not yet decided what it would be. Large market gardens still sat between the houses, supplying Paris with its vegetables, while new building was already closing in around them. That in-between moment is the subject – neither countryside nor city, but the few years before it settles.
The view from his own studio, and those odd decimals
Gauguin had lived in this very quarter since 1877, at 8 rue Carcel, where he had his first home with a studio; the museum label for the painting describes the scene as the view from Gauguin’s studio at the edge of Paris. The Smith College Museum of Art gives the size in inches, as American museums do: 26 × 39.5 in (height × width). Since an inch is exactly 2.54 cm, that converts to 66.04 × 100.33 cm – which is where the odd decimals come from. They are not an error and not a rounding, but the exact conversion of the museum’s own measurement. The accession number is SC 1953.55, and the painting was acquired by purchase.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
The greens, the tiled roofs and the grey sky make this a quiet picture – it works in a study, along a hallway or above a sideboard, where a loud colour would be unwelcome, and the landscape format suits a wide wall. The original measures 100.33 × 66.04 cm; we paint it in eight sizes, which you choose in the selector above this text. From the later years there is Winter Landscape – a landscape again, but Breton and under snow; Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven shows the manner once it had moved away from Impressionism, and where that road ended is told by Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? from Tahiti.
- Subject: The Market Gardens of Vaugirard, Paul Gauguin, 1879, Paris
- Technique: hand-painted canvas, oil on canvas, a reproduction – never a print
- Original: oil on canvas, 100.33 × 66.04 cm, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, acc. no. SC 1953.55
- Detail worth knowing: the museum measures in inches – 26 × 39.5 in – and the decimals 66.04 and 100.33 are the exact conversion of that figure
