The Market Gardens of Vaugirard is an 1879 painting in the Impressionist style by the leading French artist Paul Gauguin.
The Market Gardens of Vaugirard is evidence of Paul Gauguin’s early Impressionist phase, with dappled light effects created by small dashes of colour, causing the canvas to pulsate. The scene is in Paris, where the city had just been redesigned earlier in the decade according to more rational principles. Perhaps, in this light, Gauguin’s picture of the gardens becomes a hymn to a more spontaneous and lively past which urbanisation was in danger of suppressing.
Shortly after painting this picture, Gauguin would turn to Neo-Impressionism as the focus of his paintings for the rest of his life.
Paul Gauguin’s The Market Gardens of Vaugirard (or Les Maraîchers de Vaugirard, ou Les Jardins du marché de Vaugirard in his native French) is in the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts.