In a letter to Emile Schuffenecker, Gauguin advises, “…don’t paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! Study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result…to create like our Divine Master.” Gauguin makes clear his intention not to portray nature with complete accuracy and, as a result, his place-ideas for Brittany and Martinique are more based in the mythical and imaginary realm. However, in Martinique he found an environment that was foreign, primordial and relatively untouched so he created a more natural piece, as the ‘divine master’ originally had. His depiction of the view from the Morne d’Orange of the bay of Saint-Pierre was his only pure landscape painted on the island in 1887. Scholars’ ability
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By looking at Vision After the Sermon in contrast to Martinique Landscape it is evident to see which location, including the place-ideas that Gauguin had about each location, worked best with his style and artistic vision. In Vision After the Sermon he created a sense of Brittany through the costumed piety of figures associated with the region, however, through coloring and compositional make up the viewer is removed from a temporal location and placed in the vision of a faithful Breton woman. By not including aspects of an actual location Gauguin is perpetuating his mythical place-ideas about the primitive spirituality of the region. In Martinique Landscape Gauguin was looking for the savage and the primitive in an untarnished tropical setting. While Gauguin’s place-ideas of Martinique resulted in a disregard for human impact on the location, his western assumptions about the island were closer to accuracy and therefore Gauguin produced a more naturalistic piece. Neither of the pieces can claim accurate representation of the locations in which they were set, but this was never something that Gauguin claimed to attempt. Instead, a mix of artistic vision and western place-ideas about Brittany and Martinique produced these distorted
By looking at Vision After the Sermon in contrast to Martinique Landscape it is evident to see which location, including the place-ideas that Gauguin had about each location, worked best with his style and artistic vision. In Vision After the Sermon he created a sense of Brittany through the costumed piety of figures associated with the region, however, through coloring and compositional make up the viewer is removed from a temporal location and placed in the vision of a faithful Breton woman. By not including aspects of an actual location Gauguin is perpetuating his mythical place-ideas about the primitive spirituality of the region. In Martinique Landscape Gauguin was looking for the savage and the primitive in an untarnished tropical setting. While Gauguin’s place-ideas of Martinique resulted in a disregard for human impact on the location, his western assumptions about the island were closer to accuracy and therefore Gauguin produced a more naturalistic piece. Neither of the pieces can claim accurate representation of the locations in which they were set, but this was never something that Gauguin claimed to attempt. Instead, a mix of artistic vision and western place-ideas about Brittany and Martinique produced these distorted