O Cristo Amarelo

Gauguin painted this in 1889 in Pont-Aven, a village in Brittany where he had gone looking for a simpler, older kind of faith than he could find in Paris. The crucified figure is not invented. It copies a 17th-century painted wooden Christ that still hangs in the small Trémalo chapel just outside the village, and Gauguin has set it outdoors in an autumn field under a plain yellow sky. Three Breton women in their regional dress kneel at the foot of the cross as if this were an everyday roadside shrine. He drew the fields in flat blocks of colour with dark outlines, closer to stained glass than to anything modelled from life, and let the single bold yellow carry the mood of that isolated, deeply devout countryside.