Landscape with Blue Tree

Meijer de Haan met Paul Gauguin at the 1889 exhibition of the Impressionist and Synthetist Group at Cafe Volpini, and accompanied him on his return to Brittany. In November of the same year, Gauguin wrote to Emile Bernard: “De Haan works incredibly well here.” Van Gogh also wrote about the artist: “De Haan’s drawings are most beautiful, I like them very much; I would greatly like to meet him one day.” The highly-simplified forms that make up this hillside orchard landscape are outlined in blue, and no perspective is created by the flat patches of colour. The resulting image shows that the artist had completely absorbed Gauguin’s aesthetic ideas, while adding his own personal touch.