Gauguin first journeyed to the town of Le Pouldu in 1886. Very little is documented of this trip other than three paintings produced (Wildenstein, 248). At the time he was living in Pont Aven, Le Pouldu was only twenty miles west - a day’s trip away.
The birth of this relationship between artist and town can already be seen in his first seascape at Le Pouldu: Rocky Coast. It is likely that Gauguin traveled there and spent a few days surveying the coastline of the area, making sketches and collecting ideas for paintings. (Wildenstein, 250) This was at a time when Gauguin was still artistically young; he had only recently left the tutelage of Pissarro, and was still experimenting with Impressionism himself (Thompson, 10).
The lines reflect something of a wildness beginning to form in his painting of the coast. Two features that stand out straight away from this painting are the rapidly receding clouds and the vivid red cliffs to the right. The flowing, parallel white lines that are used to paint the clouds seem to converge at a single point. This gives the illusion of rapid movement of the clouds into or out of the distant horizon, not only suggesting strong wind in the painting, but also introducing tension that causes the scene to dramatically jump out from the painting at the viewer.
The jagged red rocks at the right of the painting also stand out; the jumble of irregular lines within the rocks cannot compare to the more laminar flow seen in the cliff in Cliff Near Dieppe and the variety of thickness, weight and direction of these contours makes the rock almost appear as though it is burning. This is the first time features such as this appeared in Gauguin’s work, and they suggest some wildness emerging from within the artist. An even stronger wildness appears in
Rocks, Sea, painted shortly after Rocky Coast. Again a receding effect is created with the diagonal lines of clouds, but this is strengthened by also incorporating this recession in lines of the rocks at the bottom of the painting which also seem to converge at the same point on the horizon. By using this effect both in the rocks and the sky Gauguin gives the painting a sense of violent emergence into the viewer. Even though the sea appears calm, the rocks and sky create this dramatic, almost savage feeling in the painting, a feeling much stronger than anything that appeared in his Dieppe works. And so it is evident that Le Pouldu straight away influenced Gauguin to use line in a different manner in his seascapes, foreshadowing a growing savagery in the artist.