The edge of the forest (III)

This is one of a small group of forest scenes Gauguin painted in 1885, back in Paris and about as poor as he would ever be. Around this time he began telling his friend the painter Emile Schuffenecker that he was tired of Impressionism, tired of an art that only caught a passing moment of ordinary life. A landscape, he argued, should carry the feeling it stirred in whoever looked at it, and colour and line were the means to reach that. The Kroller-Muller reads this edge of a wood as a mood rather than a real place, Gauguin's own experience of one, worked up in heavy, deliberate greens far from the bright flicker of Impressionist light. The Roman numeral in its title is no whim. It is the third of several versions he made of this same stretch of trees.