Landschaft auf Martinique

In 1887, years before Tahiti, Gauguin went looking for the tropics much closer to hand. He had sailed to Panama, run out of money labouring on the canal works, and drifted north to the French island of Martinique in the Caribbean. For a few months he painted its hills and paths in hotter, bolder colour than anything in his Paris pictures, until dysentery and fever drove him home. Now in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, this is counted the finest of that small Martinique group. A red earthen path winds up through heavy green foliage, the strokes still broken and Impressionist here, already settling toward the flat glowing fields of colour he would push much further in the South Seas.