Yellow Christ, 1889 Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Paul Gauguin also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Yellow Christ is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

After adding your artwork to the shopping cart, you will be able to check the delivery price using the Estimate Shipping and Tax tool.

The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

Christ’s arms stretch almost too wide for this country sky, as if the cross had been planted not on Calvary but in the middle of a Breton field at harvest time. That is the first shock of Gauguin’s picture: sacred agony has been brought down into a landscape of red trees, ochre slopes, blue shadows and kneeling women in white coifs. At Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Yellow Christ, painted in 1889, still has the odd freshness of an apparition seen in familiar weather.

Around the foot of the cross, the women do not dramatise grief. Their bodies are compact, almost block-like, wrapped in the local costume of Brittany, and they kneel with the absorbed quiet of people saying the Angelus at day’s end. One figure in blue and rust brown is especially solid, her folded apron making a deep, earthy triangle. Behind them, the land rolls away in bands rather than distance: a yellow hill, a green patch, a row of orange trees, a small road where tiny figures bend or move with rural purpose. Space scarcely recedes. It presses forward.

Gauguin based Christ on a seventeenth-century painted wooden crucifix in the Trémalo Chapel near Pont-Aven, but he refuses antiquarian piety. Instead, he gives the body a waxen, almost overripe yellow, edged with firm dark contours. Ochre stains the torso; thin greenish strokes run along the ribs and legs, a close, unsettling detail that makes the flesh feel both carved and alive. Look at the feet: they taper with a folk-art awkwardness, yet the little crossing of the ankles has real tenderness.

Painted after Gauguin had turned away from Paris and Impressionism, this Breton vision belongs to Symbolism and to the flat, outlined manner often linked with his friend Émile Bernard. Where Monet dissolved the world in changing light, Gauguin hardens it into signs. Light here is not atmospheric. It has almost no source. Colour carries the feeling instead: autumnal orange, bruised blue, acid yellow, dull umber. The air seems dry and hushed; one can almost hear leaves scraping in a field after work.

Here, harvest is not background decoration. Gauguin understood, or wanted to believe, that Breton religious life bound crop, body and soul into one recurring cycle of death and renewal. Having left Paris in search of a less polished truth, he found in Pont-Aven a theatre of devotion and rural myth. This is not simply a crucifixion scene set among peasants. One might imagine the land itself performing the prayer. And perhaps the most unexpected thing is how calm it all feels: not consolation exactly, but endurance, yellow as ripe grain and as strange as faith itself.