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Which visual features are typical of Paul Gauguin’s Synthetist paintings?

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Self-portrait painting by Paul Gauguin showing the artist with a mustache, yellow halo, and stylized plants against a vivid orange background with green and red fruit. — Paul Gauguin Self-portrait by Paul Gauguin, oil on wood, 1889; in the Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 79.2 × 51.3 cm.

Paul Gauguin’s Synthetist paintings are characterized by a deliberate departure from the naturalistic observation of Impressionism in favor of a more decorative, symbolic approach. Typical visual features of this style include:

Flatness and Simplification: Gauguin emphasized two-dimensional arrangements, reducing figures and landscapes to flat patterns rather than using traditional perspectival space or modeling.12
Pure Color: He utilized broad, intense planes of color without shadows or tonal gradation.12
Strong Outlines: Forms were often defined by bold, dark outlines, a technique sometimes associated with cloisonnism, which helped separate color areas and emphasize the decorative design.12
Arbitrary Color and Scale: To convey emotion or "otherworldliness," Gauguin frequently distorted scale and employed vivid, non-naturalistic colors that served the subject's symbolic meaning rather than replicating reality.32
Synthesis of Ideas: The style aimed to synthesize formal elements—such as lines and color planes—with the artist's internal ideas, memories, or emotions, often blending different levels of reality, such as the everyday world and the dream world, into a single composition.13