Description
Paul Gauguin – The Yellow Christ – hand-painted oil painting reproduction
Breton women in white coifs kneel around a cross standing in the middle of a harvested field, and the whole scene is tuned to yellow. The work was painted in 1889 at Pont-Aven, oil on canvas, 92.1 × 73.3 cm, and is held by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo under accession number 1946:4. The yellow that carries the whole picture is laid down here by brush: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction in oil on canvas, never a print. The museum records the measurement as height by width.
The Christ in this painting hangs in a chapel
The model is not invented: in the Trémalo chapel near Pont-Aven hangs a polychrome wooden crucifix of the seventeenth century, and it is that figure Gauguin carried onto the canvas. The difference is where he put it. In the chapel it hangs under the roof, in half-light; in the painting it stands in an open field, in autumn light, with no walls. The figure stayed the same and the surroundings were exchanged – and with that, what we are looking at changed: not church furniture, but someone standing outside among people at work.
Why yellow
He explained the colour himself: the yellow was to express the secluded life and the piety of the Breton peasant women who kneel in their regional dress at the foot of the cross. It is therefore neither shadow nor a reflection of sunlight but a mood translated into colour. The same holds for the method: the areas are laid down without modelling and held by a dark contour, so that the painting reads like a coloured window – cloisonnism, named after the metal strips in enamel work.
The pair: what each of the two crosses does
That same autumn produced The Green Christ, and only together do the two show what Gauguin was doing. There, a stone monument that really does stand outdoors, which the painter moved to the sea; here, a wooden figure that really does hang indoors, which he carried out into the open. One is cool and turned towards the coast, the other warm and set among the stubble. The Yellow Christ was given a third life as well: it is painted on the wall behind the artist in Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ, where his own work becomes part of his face.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
Above are photographs of this very painting as it left our workshop. We paint it in eight sizes; 73 × 92 cm is effectively the measurement of the original, while for a living room 90 × 110 cm is a frequent choice. The warm yellow carries a room even in weak light, which makes it work well in a dining room or on a north-facing wall. If Pont-Aven interests you as a place rather than as a subject of piety, see also Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven.
- Subject: The Yellow Christ, Paul Gauguin, 1889
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas – never printed
- Sizes: 8 formats, from 50 × 60 cm to 150 × 190 cm, including the original measurement of 73 × 92 cm
- Interesting fact: the cross in the painting is a seventeenth-century wooden figure that still hangs in the Trémalo chapel near Pont-Aven
