O Cristo Verde

Gauguin painted this in Brittany in November 1889, during the months he spent in and around Pont-Aven. The stone Christ is not invented. Gauguin had seen mossy old wayside calvaries in the villages nearby, at Nizon and Névez and Briec, weathered green with lichen, and he fused several of them into this one grey-green crucifix. A Breton peasant woman in her white headdress sits at its foot as if the carving were part of the field, while behind her ordinary country life goes on, figures at work and sheep on the slope down toward the sea. He gave the stone the same colours as the living landscape, so the sculpture and the hillside seem cut from one substance.