Rouen, L'église Saint-Ouen

In late 1883, Gauguin left his job as a stockbroker in Paris and devoted himself entirely to his art. Together with his increasingly disillusioned wife, Mette, and their five young children, Gauguin moved to a rented house in the suburb of Beauvoisine, near Rouen. Despite his significant financial and marital woes, this period—between January and November 1884—was an enormously productive one for Gauguin. As he wrote to Camille Pissarro in July of that year, “I’m painting just for me now, without haste, and I can tell you that this time I’m doing seriously adventurous stuff” (quoted in D. Wildenstein, op. cit., p. 131). Gauguin happily spent his days wandering the surrounding region, painting the domestic and religious structures that dotted the landscape. During his time in Rouen, Gauguin continued to experiment with bold, rich pigments applied with loose, choppy brushstrokes—all evident in Rouen, L'église Saint-Ouen.
This view of the Church of Saint-Ouen was observed from a hillside near the rue de Bihorel, about a ten minute walk from Gauguin’s home in Beauvoisine. As Daniel Wildenstein has noted, however, Gauguin chose to remove a major monument from the skyline of Rouen: the enormous Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen, an iconic Gothic structure that would become the subject of a famous series of paintings by Claude Monet in 1892. In actuality, the enormous bell towers and spire of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame would be visible to the right of Saint-Ouen from this vantage point. Wildenstein suggests that Gauguin opted to edit out the larger cathedral in order to create a sense of balance within the composition. The Church of Saint-Ouen instead appears dwarfed by a majestic tree thick with emerald green leaves, emphasizing the dramatic scale of nature over manmade structures.
Back in Paris two years later, Gauguin submitted nineteen paintings to the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition of 1886—likely including Rouen, L'église Saint-Ouen, exhibited under the title Vue de Rouen. Though his work received mixed reviews from critics, Gauguin was pleased with the overall impact of the show, as well as the positive responses from his colleagues: “Our exhibition has placed the whole question of Impressionism again in the spotlight, this time in its favor. I was a big success with the artists” (quoted in D. Wildenstein, Gauguin: Premier itinéraire d'un sauvage, Catalogue de l'oeuvre peint (1873-1888), Paris, 2002, vol. II, p. 600). By this point, Gauguin had formed close relationships with the stalwarts of Impressionism, including Pissarro, as well as the nascent pointillists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. Yet Gauguin would soon distinguish himself from his colleagues by developing his own distinctive style, forged in collaboration with Vincent van Gogh in Arles in 1888.
Though this painting was probably shown in the high-profile Impressionist exhibition of 1886, Gauguin initially struggled to find a buyer. Sometime before 1890, Gauguin deposited a group of paintings and ceramics with the gallery Boussod & Valadon et Cie., Paris—then directed by Van Gogh’s younger brother, Theo. Following Theo’s death in 1891, the gallery was taken over by Maurice Joyant. In March 1893, Joyant transferred the remaining works from Gauguin’s consignment to the Parisian art collector George-Daniel de Monfreid. This group included a painting simply referred to as “Landscape, Church,” which Wildenstein has identified as the present work. Rouen, L'église Saint-Ouen subsequently changed hands several times over the course of the twentieth century—at one point, belonging to Hugo Moser, a German art dealer who managed the sale of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s art collection, following the latter’s abdication as the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Germany in 1918. Around 1957, the work entered the collection of Pedro Vallenilla Echeverria, a Venezuelan banker who formed one of the most extensive collections of modern art in South America in the twentieth century.
In addition to its fascinating early provenance, Rouen, L'église Saint-Ouen has a substantial international exhibition history. This work has been shown in a wide range of monographic and thematic exhibitions in major museums across Europe, North and South America, as well as Japan. Notably, this work appeared in an exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum entitled The Early Work of Paul Gauguin: Genesis of an Artist (March-April 1971) and more recently in a traveling exhibition that originated at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen: Cathédrales, 1789-1914: Un mythe moderne (April 2014-January 2015).