Paul Gauguin's first Impressionist painting is exhibited in Rome after 30 years.

The first Impressionist painting by Paul Gauguin (Paris, 1848 - Atuona, 1903) will be exhibited on December 14, for the first time in 30 years: it is La sente des Gratte Coqs, which will be shown at Galleria Russo in Rome, the painting’s owner. The work had already been previewed at the 2019 edition of the Flashback fair in Turin(at this link you can read the interview we did with owner and director Fabrizio Russo about it). The last time the public was able to see the work was in 1986 at the Musée Départemental Du Prieuré in Saint-Germain, France.

Gauguin painted the landscape in 1882 in Pontoise when he was a guest of his friend Camille Pissarro (Charlotte Amalie, 1830 - Paris, 1903) during his last stay in the French resort. The painting marks a turning point in Gauguin’s maturation path because, in 1882, the artist chose to give up his bank job for good in order to devote himself exclusively to art, and subsequent travels (Normandy, Brittany, Provence) would determine the evolution of his style. In La sente des Gratte Coqs, Gauguin dimmonstrates that he has assimilated Pissarro’s teachings in order to surpass them: the path of Gratte Coqs had also been depicted previously by Pissarro, but for Gauguin it becomes a symbolic landscape that testifies to the path he took through painting toward the full maturity that would make him one of the landmarks of modern art.

The work is considered the French painter’s first Impressionist painting: an intellectual vision of nature not reproduced photographically but interpreted and recreated with accents that would become explicitly Symbolist in his more mature works. What the artist renders is a space that seems to expand and compress at the same time with a dense chromatic drafting of matter, in full Impressionist style.

The canvas thus stands as a watershed between two different periods in the artist’s career and foreshadows the advances Gauguin would make in later years. Fabrizio Russo calls it “a work that today is worth millions but is instead invaluable from an artistic point of view. It testifies to what we would call the beginning of the career of one of the major protagonists of the Impressionist season.” It is, Fabrizio Russo concludes, “a privilege for Galleria Russo, which with its 120 years has been an expression of the history of the art market in Italy in the 20th century.”

Image: Paul Gauguin, La Sente des Gratte Coqs (1882; oil on canvas, 56 x 46 cm)

Paul Gauguin's first Impressionist painting is exhibited in Rome after 30 years.

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