The Yellow Christ

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The Yellow Christ: Paul Gauguin

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Paul Gauguin Oil Painting - The Yellow Christ

Keywords: Yellow, Christ

Work Overview: The Yellow Christ
Artist Paul Gauguin
Year 1889
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 91.1 cm × 73.4 cm (35.9 in × 28.9 in)
Location Albright-Knox Art Gallery

The Yellow Christ (in French: Le Christ jaune) is a painting executed by Paul Gauguin in 1889 in Pont-Aven. Together with The Green Christ, it is considered to be one of the key works of Symbolism in painting.

Gauguin first visited Pont-Aven in 1886. He returned to the village in early 1888 to stay until mid-October, when he left to join Vincent van Gogh in Arles, for little more than two months. Early in 1889, Gauguin was back to Pont-Aven to stay there until spring 1890. It was only for a short visit in summer 1889 to Paris to see the Exposition universelle and to arrange the Volpini Exhibition that Gauguin interrupted this sojourn. Soon after his return to Pont-Aven he painted The Yellow Christ:

The Yellow Christ is a symbolic piece that shows the crucifixion of Christ taking place in nineteenth-century northern France as Breton women are gathered in prayer. Gauguin relies heavily on bold lines to define his figures and reserves shading only for the women. The autumn palette of yellow, red and green in the landscape echoes the dominant yellow in the figure of Christ. The bold outlines and flatness of the forms in this painting are typical of the cloisonnist style.

A study for The Yellow Christ in pencil is preserved in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, and a version in watercolor is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Elizabeth F. Chapman.

The Symbolists, who emerged during the 1880s, were weary of modern society and sought escape from reality. They began to express their dreams and visions through vivid colors, forms, and compositions. As part of this pursuit, Paul Gauguin left Paris altogether in the late 1880s. During the summer of 1886, he visited the small village of Pont-Aven in Brittany, France, and became fascinated with its history, folklore, and rituals. It was there that Gauguin painted numerous scenes, including “The Yellow Christ.” The central figure of this painting is based on a seventeenth-century painted wooden crucifix that hangs in the nearby Trémalo Chapel. Gauguin painted Christ in a cloying yellow against a dark brown cross in a vibrant fall landscape. Gauguin said he chose the color yellow to convey how he felt about the isolated life and piety of the peasants, several of whom are pictured here dressed in their distinctive regional costume and kneeling at the foot of the cross during the evening hour of Angelus—a Catholic prayer recited daily at 6 am, noon, and 6 pm. In Brittany, the autumn harvest possessed deep spiritual significance, as grain was believed to undergo a process parallel to the religious cycle of Christian life—birth, life, death, and rebirth. The simplicity and primitive directness of the region’s peasants greatly appealed to Gauguin, who made his famous protest against Western sophistication by exiling himself to the South Seas not long after completing this painting. Brittany was Gauguin’s first step away from Paris, and his works completed during this time mark a major stylistic departure from Impressionism.

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