With its powerful imagery, striking color scheme, and bold patterns, Vorhor, The Green Wave is a vivid expression of a pervasive shift in attitude experienced by many progressive painters in late 19th-century France. The artist's right to reinterpret-rather than imitate-nature became a guiding principle of Paul Gauguin and his followers. When Georges Lacombe encountered them in 1892, he rapidly adopted their independent outlook and decorative impulse.
The inspiration for this image is a specific site amidst the steep cliffs of Vorhor, on the dramatic Brittany shore north of Pont-Aven. Fascinated by the sea, the young artist from Versailles summered in the region, and from 1893 to 1897 he produced a series of coastal views that are his most innovative paintings. Lacombe was tempted to anthropomorphize the rocks, finding in their chiseled masses unusual shapes that resembled human forms. He also exaggerated his colors, choosing brilliant tints of turquoise, mauve, and gold. Familiar with Japanese prints, Lacombe borrowed their use of flattened perspective and the practice of treating waves as decorative patterns. Drawn into the narrow gap where the tides pound the shore, the viewer senses an air of foreboding, a mystical element that binds Lacombe to the larger artistic and literary movement known as Symbolism.
Twice a day, the inexhaustible source engraves,
Traces as if at will its magical patterns,
Its laces of scales and feathers of birds.
-Georges Lacombe, from "Symbole," 1909
