{"id":194685,"date":"2026-08-15T10:26:52","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T08:26:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svetslik.si\/?post_type=product&p=194685"},"modified":"2026-08-15T10:27:04","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T08:27:04","slug":"the-gate-la-barriere","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/svetslik.si\/en\/paul-gauguin\/the-gate-la-barriere\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Gauguin \u2013 The Gate (La Barri\u00e8re)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Gate \u2013 the same wooden gate was painted the same year by a second painter<\/h2>\n

A wide wooden gate of pale palings rises from the right across the lower part of the canvas. Behind it a grassy bank climbs steeply, with pigs grazing on it. At the right edge stands a woman in Breton dress with a white cap, and beside her a reddish fence. Above are the thatched roofs of low houses and a dense crown of leaves that closes off the sky. The colours are earthen: green, brick, brown. At the lower left a signature with a year is painted into the grass. The work is held by the Kunsthaus Z\u00fcrich under inventory number 1981\/0002; it was painted in 1889.<\/p>\n

Paul S\u00e9rusier painted the same gate<\/h3>\n

The museum record carries a fact that does not leave this canvas on its own: the same wooden lattice gate was painted in the same year, 1889, by Paul S\u00e9rusier as well, and his picture now hangs in the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay in Paris. The scene was therefore not chosen by chance; two painters stopped in the same Breton village in front of the same object. The record adds that it was in that very year that S\u00e9rusier founded the Symbolist group of artists known as the Nabis.<\/p>\n

Where the scene was painted<\/h3>\n

The record names the place as well: the Breton fishing village of Le Pouldu, not far from Pont-Aven. This is the country in which the painter spent part of the late eighteen-eighties, and a series of canvases came out of it with the same low horizon and the same steep banks.<\/p>\n

The gate stands across the whole width<\/h3>\n

The wooden structure is not an incidental object but the largest thing on the canvas: it runs diagonally from the lower right corner towards the middle and closes off the viewer\u2019s way into the scene. What lies behind it we see only above it. That is why the painting reads as a look from behind an edge rather than as an open view.<\/p>\n

The museum lists other titles too<\/h3>\n

Beside the main title the record lists several others under which the work is known, among them a German one and an older one naming the woman who keeps the animals. All of them describe the same canvas. This is not a contradiction but the ordinary condition of works that have changed languages and collections over more than a hundred years.<\/p>\n

How a hand-painted reproduction is made<\/h3>\n

Every painting here is made by hand in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. In this motif the palings of the gate are the hardest part: they have to stay straight and light without becoming white lines, or they come away from the bank behind them. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished work for approval. Nothing on these pages is printed; the colour is mixed and laid on again for each canvas.<\/p>\n