Red Roof by the Water, or Landscape with Red Roof

By 1885 Gauguin had been painting full time for about three years, and he still worked the way the Impressionists had taught him. The older painter Camille Pissarro, a friend, had shown him how to build a landscape from small touches of close-keyed color, and that lesson runs through this canvas. It is a tall picture given over almost entirely to green: the riverbank, the foliage, the water, all in short broken strokes. The one warm accent is the red roof that gives the painting its name, a small patch of tile color set against the damp northern green. None of the flat, saturated color and bold outlines he would reach a few years later in Brittany has arrived here. He is still an Impressionist, laying one careful stroke beside another.