In 1886 he contributed no less than nineteen pictures to an exhibition of the Impressionist group, together with a relief in wood, which seems to foreshadow the later creator of _La Guerre et la Paix_. Most of these early works of Gauguin seem to have disappeared. Very few can recall seeing one. It is therefore interesting to read the following appreciation by Felix Fenéon, which shows that Gauguin was already traveling far from the formulas that satisfied the other impressionists:-- "The tones of M. Paul Gauguin's pictures are very little separated from each other; because of this, there is in his work a dull harmony. Dense trees rise from the fertile soil, abundant and humid, invade the frame, pursue the sky. The air is heavy. Bricks seen between the trunks indicate a nearby house; things are lying about, muzzles are scattered in the thicket--cows. These reds of roofs and of cattle the artist constantly opposes to his greens and reflects them again in the waters, encumbered with long grasses, which run between the tree-trunks." This shows clearly that Gauguin was treating landscape at this period already as a synthesis, a decorative whole and not, like Manet, Pissarro or the Divisionists, as an exercise in the analysis of atmospheric vibration. As for the relief on wood, Fenéon writes: "On the pear-tree wood, which we regret to see left in monochrome, a naked woman stands out in half relief, her hand to her hair, seated rectangularly in a landscape. This is the only number of sculpture. Nothing in painted wood, in glass-paste, in wax." Paris with her art-theories had nothing now to teach Gauguin. He must find his own way, create his own tradition. Aloof alike from the theories of the Impressionists and from those of their successors, the Pointillists--theories of the disassociation of tones and of the analytic disintegration of light, based on the scientific treatises of Chevreuil and Helmholtz--he was painfully tending back to the old decorative tradition that a picture must be an unit, the harmonious expression of a single emotion. Hunger proved again the best friend of the independent artist. He fled from Paris and sought refuge in the country. II The place of refuge which Gauguin found was the village of Pont-Aven in the district of Finistère in Brittany. There is no doubt that this chosen spot and its surroundings had upon his art an influence only secondary to that exercised later by Tahiti. Indeed the charm of Tahiti itself was slow to efface this influence.