Paul Gauguin Poster - In the Waves

If you stand here for a moment, you can feel how staged and yet how strangely wild this scene is. In Paul Gauguin’s In the Waves (Dans les vagues), painted in 1889, we’re not just watching a woman swim; we’re watching a modern European woman symbolically throw herself out of polite society and into something more instinctive, more dangerous, more “primitive,” as Gauguin would have put it. 

Look at how her body cuts diagonally through the water, like a lightning bolt of flesh. The pose is exaggerated, almost theatrical – back arched, arms lifted, head tipped up into nothing we can see. She’s not a portrait; she’s an idea. Gauguin loved myth and might have had a water nymph, an ondine, in mind, but he uses that old motif to talk about contemporary desire and escape. 

Now notice the color: that thick green sea pushing against that flat, almost shocking orange area near the top. This isn’t naturalistic; the hues are deliberately “wrong,” almost invented. They’re doing psychological work rather than documentary work. The clash between green and orange creates a vibrational tension, as if the whole picture is humming with unease. That’s Gauguin stepping firmly away from Impressionist observation and into Symbolism, where color and line stand in for inner states of mind. 

He painted this in Pont-Aven, a small coastal village in Brittany where he went precisely to get away from Paris and its modern bustle. Ironically, he projects that same longing for escape onto the woman here: she’s literally immersed in nature, but the scene feels anything but innocent. There’s pleasure, certainly, but also risk – she’s simultaneously liberated and exposed. 

If you follow the outlines, you’ll see how simplified everything is. The waves are reduced to curving stripes and white ridges; her body is contained by firm, dark contours. That flattening and stylisation are part of Gauguin’s synthetist style: he boils reality down into bold, graphic shapes and charged colors to get at something more emotional, more symbolic than a straightforward seascape. 

So, while it reads at first as a single woman in the surf, what you’re really looking at is a manifesto in paint. Gauguin is announcing that the sea, the nude, and color itself are now tools for exploring inner turmoil, forbidden desire, and the fantasy of leaving the “civilized” world behind. Standing here, you’re not just by the shore—you’re right at the edge between modern life and the seductive pull of elsewhere.

Museum-quality poster made on long-lasting semi-glossy (silk) paper.

- Paper-weight: 170 gsm / 65 lb.

- Shipped in sturdy packaging protecting the poster.

Frame not included.