The Yellow Christ

The Yellow Christ is an oil on canvas that Paul Gauguin painted in 1889, shortly after returning to Pont-Aven, on the Breton coast, where he lived in several stays between 1886 and 1890. Together with The Green Christ, it is regarded as one of the key works of Symbolist painting and marks a decisive step in Gauguin's search for a synthetic style.

The scene is set in Brittany rather than in Judea. The crucifixion appears as a religious vision within an autumnal Breton landscape: on the right, a figure leaps over a fence, a move usually read as an escape; in the background, fields and scattered houses show between the trees. Three Breton women, kneeling in devotion, take the place traditionally given to the Marys beside the cross, and the figure of Christ appears before them as a vision.

The painting relies on cloisonnism, a technique inspired by enamels and stained glass: broad areas of flat colour are outlined in blue or black. Gauguin keeps modelling and shading almost exclusively for the women, while the rest is resolved in flat planes of colour. For him colour was the primary element, and he called his approach synthetism, since it combines what the artist sees with the feelings the subject provokes in him.

The palette of yellows, oranges and greens reflects the colours of the Breton autumn. In local tradition, that season was understood as a kind of crucifixion of the crops, which would be reborn in spring, and the painter seems to draw on that reading. The figure of Christ derives from a seventeenth-century polychrome wooden carving by an anonymous artist, kept in the chapel of Trémalo, near Pont-Aven; Gauguin turned its pale whitish tone into an intense yellow, which gives the work its name.

That same year he returned to the motif in Self-Portrait with the Yellow Christ, where the crucifix is reflected and almost reversed, as in a mirror, and where the face partly recalls the artist's own features. A pencil study and a watercolour sketch related to the composition also survive.

Painter

Paul Gauguin

Date

1889

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

92 × 73 cm

Museum

Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo

Movement

Symbolism, Post-impressionism, Pont-Aven School, Impressionism, primitivism, cloisonnism

Genre

religious art

Depicts

Chapelle de Trémalo, Jesus Christ, crucifixion of Jesus

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