Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin

In December 1888 Gauguin and Van Gogh went to see a famous picture in Montpellier, Courbet's Meeting, where the painter shows himself striding along a road and being greeted, hat raised, like a visiting gentleman. A year later, poor and stuck in a Breton village, Gauguin painted his answer to it. He kept Courbet's greeting for the title but turned everything around. Here he stands at a wooden gate, cap pulled low, a rough figure the peasant woman seems to be edging away from. That winter he was scraping by at Le Pouldu on the Brittany coast, his bright flat colours still baffling buyers. The picture now hangs in Prague, far from the fields it shows.