Busagny Farm, Osny

Busagny Farm at Osny (1883) documents Gauguin's intense engagement with Pissarro's working method during his extended stays in the Pontoise-Osny area in the early 1880s. Pissarro had been painting the farms and orchards of Osny — just across the Oise from Pontoise — for years, and Gauguin's choice of the same specific subjects placed him in direct dialogue with his mentor's approach. Pissarro himself painted Busagny Farm, making this one of the rare instances in the history of French painting where a near-exact comparison of teacher's and student's version of the same motif is possible. Gauguin's treatment is already detectably different: his forms are more solid and structural, less dissolved in atmospheric light, reflecting the influence of Cézanne whose work he was also studying through Pissarro's collection. The transition from Impressionist dissolution to structural solidity that Gauguin was beginning in 1883 would accelerate rapidly, and within five years he had departed entirely from the Impressionist vocabulary he had learned in these Osny fields.

The farm buildings are rendered with greater structural definition than typically Impressionist, the walls and roof planes clearly differentiated. The foliage is built in short strokes of varied green and ochre. The sky is relatively thin and unmodulated compared to the denser handling of the earth and buildings.