Gauguin’s first major painting to survive, Working the Land, is dated 1873. It shows a flat, panoramic landscape in the environs of Paris. Two small figures are working patchwork green and yellow fields. A few trees provide verticals. The land is well observed, if dully painted. The sky is a disaster. A bank of cotton wool cloud presses down heavily, squashing the earth. Corot is the major influence, along with the other Barbizon painters that Gauguin was so familiar with from Arosa’s walls. There is nothing Impressionist about it, but the compositional similarity to the overdoor Spring in Pissarro’s Four Seasons is striking. The other pictures that survive from this couple of early years are similarly cautious landscapes.
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