The Green Christ

The Green Christ is an 1889 oil painting in which Paul Gauguin shows a Breton woman seated in the grass at the foot of a green-tinted wooden calvary. The scene does not correspond to a single real place: the Atlantic coast at Le Pouldu forms the backdrop, but the sculptural group combines features from several calvaries in the region. The cross recalls the one in the centre of Névez, and the figure of Christ is based on the one at Briec, both villages some distance from the sea. Gauguin painted it in Pont-Aven, where he was living, and the image draws on the strong Catholic faith and traditional customs of the Breton people, which he observed with real interest.

The woman wears modest clothing and holds a black lamb, while the figures of Christ and the woman adopt almost identical poses. This resemblance suggests a link between Christ's suffering and human suffering, which the painting connects with the Fall of the first parents and the need for forgiveness. Some scholars have proposed that the object in the woman's hand resembles the rope of the chair in Van Gogh's portrait of Madame Roulin; if so, she would be rocking an unseen cradle beyond the frame, and the picture would allude to the whole cycle of birth, death and redemption. This reading remains debated.

Gauguin was not aiming for realism. He sought to convey the weight of human suffering emotionally, through simplified forms and non-naturalistic colour. The figures on the calvary are rather schematic, and the artist is thought to have been less than fully satisfied with the result, perhaps because he struggled to give visual form to the religious imagery he wanted to express. Its ambiguity links it with other paintings of the same period, such as The Yellow Christ and Vision After the Sermon.

Painter

Paul Gauguin

Date

1889

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

92 × 74 cm

Museum

Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels-Capital Region

Genre

religious art

Depicts

Calvaire de Nizon, calvary

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