Die Welle

Gauguin painted this in Brittany in 1888, the same autumn he packed up and went south to share a house with Van Gogh in Arles. Japanese woodblock prints were everywhere in Paris by then, and Gauguin collected them. You can see it here. The very title echoes Hokusai, and the surf curls in the flat, patterned way of a printed wave rather than anything he saw from the shore. Two small women scramble up a beach he has painted a hot vermilion red, the colour of no real sand. He was pulling away from painting what the eye reports toward colour chosen for its own force. The high, tilted viewpoint leaves almost no sky.