Les meules jaunes ou La moisson blonde (Yellow haystacks or Golden harvest)

After moving to Pont-Aven in Brittany, Paul Gauguin began to paint the daily lives of Breton farmhands.

The scene depicted here, just in front of a farm, shows bundles of wheat being stacked and covered in straw to protect them from bad weather.

He isn't seeking to reproduce the scene faithfully, but rather to apply his Synthesist doctrine. Through this approach, he advocates for heightened sentimentality by using bold colors, simplifying geometric shapes, and doing away with any depth effects.

Each element becomes a big flat rendition of the object, depicted in the artist's favorite colors.

The painting's main subject, the huge haystack, dominates the barely-there silhouettes of the two female farmhands at work who seem ready to be absorbed into the stack.

A deconstruction of Gauguin's own desire to immerse himself in color.