Osny, rue de Pontoise, Winter 1883

Curator: Soaked in ochre and umber, with the raw canvas peeking through, Paul Gauguin’s 1883 oil on canvas, "Osny, rue de Pontoise, Winter" is, on first glance, almost monochromatic. Editor: Indeed. It evokes a very subdued mood. The heavy impasto of the brushstrokes really conveys the chill of winter. It's all tactile, isn't it? You feel you could almost brush the snow from that lane. Curator: Gauguin painted this en plein air. This work offers an interesting perspective on the period following the more established Impressionist movement. Editor: You see that in the atmospheric perspective, of course, how the buildings fade and dissolve into the pale sky. And then you've got those strong verticals of the trees balancing the horizontality of the road. There's real compositional mastery here. Curator: He was living in Osny at the time, pursuing painting while still working as a stockbroker. Works like this show us how the move to landscape offered artists in the late 19th Century an arena to reflect changing social and economic circumstances beyond the Parisian metropolis. Editor: Absolutely. And even though this predates his more radical later works, there's something daring about his limited palette. And his almost crude handling of the paint—far from the smooth, academic finishes of the time. Look how the raw canvas gives that almost luminous effect to the winter light on the street! Curator: We can see in paintings such as "Osny, rue de Pontoise, Winter", the journey of Gauguin from a conventional impressionist to someone willing to radically distort forms, and explore color to its maximum emotional potential in the service of expressing a personal vision. Editor: I am struck once more by how that path of cool light pulls you right into the landscape; a superb essay on perspective and light using deceptively simple brushstrokes.