The Gate

In 1889 Paris was busy raising the Eiffel Tower for the world's fair, a lattice of iron built to show off the age of the machine. Gauguin spent much of that year at the far end of the country, in Le Pouldu, a poor fishing hamlet on the Breton coast, where the newest thing worth painting was an old wooden farm gate. He flattens field, wall and sky into broad blocks of colour, the manner he was pressing on the younger painters who had gathered around him. One of them, Paul Sérusier, set his easel at the same lattice gate that same year. His version now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, a short walk from where the iron tower still stands.