The Blue Roof

By 1890 Gauguin had given up on Pont-Aven, the Breton village that had drawn too many other painters, and moved to Le Pouldu, a scattering of farms about 20 kilometres down a windswept stretch of coast. This is one of the pictures he made there, in what turned out to be his last full year in France before he sailed for Tahiti in the spring of 1891. You can already see him leaving ordinary landscape behind. The stone farm buildings, the thatch and the blue roof are pressed flat against the canvas, the fields turned into bands of rich pattern, so the whole scene reads almost like a woven tapestry rather than a window onto a view. The rough, varied brushwork still catches the texture of stone and grass. In 2024 the National Gallery of Australia bought it, the first Gauguin painting to enter an Australian public collection.