Breton Village under the Snow

Gauguin painted this snowy Breton village in 1894, during his last stay in Pont-Aven, much of it spent laid up with an ankle he had shattered in a brawl. Then he carried the canvas to the far side of the world. When he died in the Marquesas in 1903, it was still among his things, and his effects were auctioned off in Papeete, in Tahiti. The story goes that the auctioneer held this picture up the wrong way round and announced it as Niagara Falls, the white rooftops passing for falling water, until the writer Victor Segalen bought it and turned it right side up. Segalen's family kept it until 1952. A cold French village, it had spent years under a tropical sky.