A new, more pronounced savagery can be seen in the line in The Wave, painted during Gauguin’s second period of visits to Le Pouldu, which took place two years later, in 1888. By this year he approached art from an entirely different perspective and there was a significant change in the style of all his paintings (Wildenstein, 356). The Wave shows many influences from many different artists and styles, but the key feature of this painting, the wildness of it, is only drawn from the seascape itself.
There is a strong sense of tension, almost aggression, found in this painting, and it is created by a clever use of line. This exaggeration of the landscape is something that Gauguin later explained in a letter to van Gogh; he was strongly affected by the character of the landscape, and “Seeing this every day fills me with a sensation of struggle for survival, of melancholy and acquiescence in implacable laws. I am attempting to put this sensation down on canvas, not by chance, but quite deliberately, perhaps by exaggerating…” (Malingue, 124). The way Gauguin does this in The Wave is to highlight of the diagonal crated by the three rocks in the water, from top left to bottom right in the painting. By comparing the painting to the actual site today, we can see that Gauguin added the rock in the top right corner himself, it is not really there. This suggests that Gauguin purposefully created this diagonal line to stand out in the centre of the canvas; to make the scene even more powerful than it really was in order to highlight the savagery of the painting that he wanted to depict. Another contributor to this is the contrast between the horizontal brushstrokes of the water with the vertical ones in the rocks, which makes them stand out of the painting even more. In the case of this painting the wildness of the scene led him to add more features to exaggerate the line and to make the scene appear even more powerful than it was in the first place.
There is a distinct development in the strength of influence of Le Pouldu in line Gauguin’s work between his first visit to it in 1886 and the second in 1888. Both periods see an increase of wildness in his painting, but by The Wave, the effects are much more extreme. Whereas initially he was only influenced to slightly mould the contours of the seascape to create a tension and wildness, during the second phase of his visits to the area he was influenced so strongly that he was ready to change the composition of the landscape to facilitate the depiction of the definite wildness of the coast. Thus as he became further exposed to this coastline his artistic character was moulded further towards wildness and savagery.