GAUGUIN, Paul

Gauguin executed this painting in Tahiti after his final move there in 1896. In 1898 it was sold to Degas who admired Gauguin’s art.

When Gauguin returned to France in August 1893, penniless and sick, he settled in a studio in Paris with Annah the Javanese, a mulatto whom he had found wandering in the street and who soothed his nostalgia for faraway lands and races. He decorated his new abode with chrome yellow walls, hung with his paintings and those remaining works from his collection by other artists, including C�zanne and Van Gogh. The decoration also included numerous Polynesian works, which he had brought back, especially idols carved in unknown red, orange, or black woods.

Despite her exotic name, the 13-year-old Annah was in fact Singalese. It is generally assumed that this work represents Annah with her pet monkey Taoa. The Tahitian inscription on the painting, which may be translated as ‘the child-woman Judith is not yet breached’, seems at first to have little relevance to the subject. It has been suggested that this refers to Judith Molard, the daughter of his friend William Molard, who was also 13 years old. Perhaps by depicting Annah with all the sangfroid of Manet’s Olympia and referring to the sexually naive Judith in the title, he is poking fun at the constraints imposed by her bourgeois parents. They, of course, would not have understood the title.

In August 1901, Gauguin settled in the Marquesas Islands, in the remote village of Atuona, where he built his “House of Pleasure,” decorated with his wood carvings and paintings. The lack of money and ill-health were made worse by a permanent conflict with the authorities, from the police to the bishop. In the midst of these worries that gradually weakened him, he painted his last masterpieces, And the Gold of Their Bodies, Barbarian Tales.

This drawing is probably a study for a larger painting, however, there are no known painting with which it could be associated. Although at the top Gauguin included a poem by Verlain, the drawing cannot be considered an illustration to the poem.

This relief was created while the artist was hoping to be able to depart for the tropics in search of a simpler lifestyle. It reveals his longing for a primitive and original art which he sought to achieve during the time he spent in the South Seas.

This work was produced in response to the painting by Courbet, the Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, that Gauguin and van Gogh had seen together in the Mus�e Fabre in Montpellier in December 1888. Gauguin’s version, painted several months later, bears little overt resemblance to the original.

In Courbet’s version, the artist depicted himself in the guise of a wandering Jew who meets his patron Bruyas, accompanied by his manservant on the road to Montpellier. Bruyas doffs his hat to the artist, and the servant stands with head respectfully lowered. In depicting himself thus, Courbet has referred to the changing status of the artist in the nineteenth century and has represented himself in a romantic role, as an essentially misunderstood, creative genius, working outside the norms of bourgeois society. It was to this aspect that Gauguin responded in this version, and the flavour of the original has been retained, although the composition and figures are markedly different. From his earliest self-portraits Gauguin had cast himself in the role of the artistic martyr and in 1889 this was to reach a climax in works like the Green Christ and Christ in the Garden of Olives.

This work is a mature example of cloisonnism, a style of post-Impressionist painting with bold and flat forms separated by dark contours. Cloisonnism was a movement created by Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, and Louis Anquetin, along with other members of the School of Pont-Aven.

This charming pastel picture was among the works shown in 1888 by Gauguin at his first exhibition organized by Theo van Gogh who later purchased it.

By the time he painted this work, Gauguin had exhausted the possibilities for ‘savage’ representations of Breton life at Pont-Aven, which was becoming increasingly commercialised. In July and August of 1889 and again in October he went to the more remote area of Le Pouldu, in an attempt to recapture the more exotic aspects of Breton life in his work. This canvas demonstrates the kind of ambivalence that he experienced at this time. The subject is as picturesque as Four Breton Women, and as such would have appealed to a Parisian audience who subscribed to the myth of the remote, archaic way of life in Brittany. At the same time, however, he has deliberately made the image more crude and less immediately appealing by grossly enlarging the children’s coarse feet and giving them baleful expressions. He has also attempted to create a strong, forceful image, with the two interlinked bodies against a colourful, simplified background.

This work is probably a preliminary study for a larger, unknown painting. It is an extreme example of cloisonnism.

Gauguin painted this canvas in Pont-Aven, between two trips to Tahiti. The influence of his first stay in Tahiti is clearly seen on this painting, the figures of the Breton women are similar to his Tahitian nudes.

This work was probably produced at the beginning of 1894, when Gauguin painted another snowscape, Paris in the Snow (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Van Gogh). During his two years in Paris he painted far fewer works than before - large amounts of his time were taken up with organizing his show at Durand-Ruel’s and on a number of literary projects. Consequently, what little he did paint was not new in either subject or treatment. This landscape is remarkably similar to those that he had produced during his Impressionist period - the small brush-strokes are quite different from the broad sweeps of colour that characterized his Tahitian works.

This drawing on laid paper, squared in graphite, was intended for later use in paintings.

After his stay in Brittany, in 1887 Gauguin went to the island of Martinique in the Lesser Antilles in the eastern Caribbean Sea. The present painting was executed there. In this painting he applied the technique of the Impressionists. In the strong sunshine of Martinique his colours became much brighter than in Brittany.

In 1889 Gauguin had painted a pair of works entitled Women Bathing (Life and Death) and Woman in the Waves (Ondine). The latter (in the Cleveland Museum of Art) depicts a naked woman, seen from behind, cast adrift in the waves, and in Fatata te miti he has reused the same subject, setting her within a Tahitian genre scene. In Ondine, Gauguin had treated the myth of the water-sprite who can only become human after having a child fathered by a man. Once again, he has explored the theme of the joy of sexual union as an essentially liberating activity, hinted at in the alternative title for The Loss of Virginity: The Awakening of Spring. In Fatata te miti the sexual abandonment is seen as part of the natural rhythm of Polynesian life (the two women do not appear perturbed at the presence of the fisherman in the background of the work), a notion that was integral to the highly popular Marriage of Loti, which Gauguin had read before visiting Tahiti and which was calculated to appeal to a Parisian audience.

In October 1889 Gauguin returned to Le Pouldu, where he stayed at the inn of Marie Henry with Meyer de Haan. Shortly after their arrival, they began to decorate the inn’s dining room and this work was one of the panels Gauguin produced. It hung above the entrance doorway with a second version of Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin. The work’s decorative purpose meant that Gauguin could capitalize on the heavily stylised forms, bold colours and abstract patterns which he had used in earlier works.

The hieratic figure of the woman is a deliberate attempt to make reference to the kind of non-Western art that Gauguin had seen earlier that year at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where he was particularly influenced by the art in the French colonial section. In fact, the pose of the woman is borrowed from a photograph of the Javanese temple at Borobudur, and was to reappear in later Tahitian works, including Ia Orana Maria which, like the Caribbean Woman with Sunflowers makes no attempt at authenticity but rather combines cultural references in the desire to evoke not so much a pantheistic vision as a deliberately ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’ flavour, which Gauguin was increasingly failing to discover in Brittany.

Gauguin has returned to a scene from Christ’s Passion, chronologically preceding that of the Green Christ and the Yellow Christ, in which his isolation and impending martyrdom are made apparent by the gloomy tonality against which his flaming hair glows, and by an all-encompassing landscape which heightens the sense of alienation. Once again, the identification of the artist with Christ is too overt to be overlooked.

In August 1901, Gauguin settled in the Marquesas Islands, in the remote village of Atuona, Hiva Oa, where he built his “House of Pleasure,” decorated with his wood carvings and paintings. The lack of money and ill-health were made worse by a permanent conflict with the authorities, from the police to the bishop. In the midst of these worries that gradually weakened him, he painted his last masterpieces, And the Gold of Their Bodies, Barbarian Tales.

Gauguin perceived that which civilised man calls contemptuously “barbarian” and “savage” as morally wholesome, as containing a primordial purity, a healthier and more normal state of human condition. Consequently, he escaped always further, first to Brittany, and then to Martinique, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands. Before Pablo Picasso and Andr� Derain discovered African art, Gauguin found his inspiration in primitive arts.

In his late paintings, produced on Hiva Oa, Gauguin seems to have attempted a reconciliation between his Western past, and the more “savage” Polynesia. Nowhere is this more evident than in Contes Barbares. The West is represented here by the figure of the painter Meyer de Haan (1852-1895), a friend of Gauguin, who accompanied him to Brittany but due to health reasons could not follow him to the South Pacific, whom Gauguin had not seen since they had worked together in Brittany. The liberty that Gauguin has taken with this portrait, and the suggestion of a demonic aspect to Meyer de Haan’s character, implies a West that is necessarily corrupt. The Orient, on the other hand, is represented by two stoical Polynesian figures, the red-haired figure of Tohotaua, who was portrayed in Woman with a Fan, and the dark-haired woman who sits in a classic Buddhist pose, perhaps a quotation from Borobudur.

The meaning of the title is not clear. In his last works, Gauguin had abandoned his earlier practice of naming his paintings, but he made an exception here. The steady gaze of all three figures suggests that any communication is conducted with the spectator rather than within the picture space itself.

This drawing is a study for the painting “When Will You Marry?” now in the �ffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel as a loan from a private collector. The figure returns later in several other compositions by Gauguin.

Gauguin’s companion at Tahiti, Tehur��, was the model of this drawing.

Gauguin designed this fan after a painting by Paul C�zanne, probably the Landscape wit Red Roofs, which was among the twelve C�zanne paintings owned by Gauguin.

This design shows motifs from Martinique but it was probably done in Paris after Gauguin’s return from Martinique.

Despite the prominence and importance of titles in Gauguin’s art, their meaning is often far from evident, and there seems to be a degree of capriciousness in their choice. It is far from clear who is posing the question here and indeed why, although the woman’s insistent gaze seems to suggest direct communication with the spectator. It is possible that it was posed to the artist himself by the archetypal Tahitian woman, since Gauguin was to leave Polynesia later that year. If that is so, then the ripe exotic fruit she nurses to her breast becomes a symbol of the sensual gratification he will leave behind by going back to French ‘civilization’. Quotations from other paintings are included, most notably the crouching maiden from Nafea faa ipoipo, who acts as a further reminder of what he will miss.

Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings celebrate the lushness and mysterious splendour of his new environment. At the same time they are seldom correct pictures of Tahitian life, from an anthropological standpoint, but rather feature recastings and recombinations of objects and persons taken out of their normal settings, as was the case with several of his paintings done in Brittany.

In this painting two Tahitian men are sitting in their hut, idly enjoying the taste of the tobacco. In the background the painter can be seen in long, white clothing, with a tropical hat.

The subject for Faaturuma may be Tehamana, Gauguin’s vahine in Mataiea. The domestic setting, with the painting on the wall, Gauguin’s rocking chair which he brought from Papeete and the prominent ring suggest that this may be the nineteenth-century equivalent of a betrothal painting.

The subject of the pensive woman had a long pedigree in Western art, and Gauguin has grafted this onto a Tahitian model. The first figure paintings that he produced in Tahiti (including Vahine no to Tiare) suggest that he was disappointed at the lack of any remaining authentic Polynesian culture on which to draw for his work, and he attempted a fusion of Western conventions and Tahitian models. It was only after reading Moerenhout in 1892 that his work capitalized on the Tahitian myths and legends that Western colonization and missionaries had effectively destroyed.

Though Gauguin may have left Paris for Tahiti to discover an unspoiled island Paradise, his mental baggage included vivid memories of Greek and Egyptian sculpture, along with copies after Egyptian paintings, all closely studied at the Mus�e Trocad�ro. So the Fisherwomen of Tahiti, painted in 1891, Gauguin’s first year on the Pacific island, retains much of the sense of profile so strongly felt in ancient or tribal cultures.

This is one of the rare flower still-lifes in Gauguin’s oeuvre. It was executed for decorating Gauguin’s book “Noa-Noa,” it was the frontispiece of the manuscript. The Noa-Noa contained 59 watercolours and coloured woodcuts, and 18 black-and-white graphics.

In 1886, Gauguin settled in Pont-Aven, a small coastal village in Brittany. Here he devoted himself entirely to painting. In the present painting the depiction of local costumes and dancing shows the painter’s interest in Breton peasant life.

Although this work represents Breton subject matter, it was probably painted from memory and from sketches back in Paris in the winter of 1886-87, an indication that Gauguin was already edging towards the synthetist treatment for his subjects by this time. The forms have been deliberately flattened, with attention paid to the white headresses and small shawls worn by the women, and a deliberate suppression of atmosphere and distance within the picture space by avoidance of a horizon and by the use of saturated colours.

Despite its authentic ‘primitive’ feel, the work is an elaborate fiction. The fancy dress that the woman are wearing had been abandoned by the Breton peasantry except for the celebration of pardons, and they were enjoying a period of relative prosperity, in part financed by a flourishing tourist trade. By painting works like this from memory, Gauguin could confect a vision of Breton life that was much closer to his notion of what constituted a ‘primitive’ existence than any that he could have found at this time.

From November 1884 to June 1885 Gauguin lived in Copenhagen with his wife and family, and it was there that he painted this self-portrait. His letters to friends in Paris chronicle what was for him a difficult period - he missed the cultural life of Paris, disliked the Danes, his wife’s family in particular, and the harsh climate meant that he could do little work in the open air. Increasingly he was forced to work indoors, without a model, and his subject matter betrays these constraints. His work became increasingly premeditated. However, in the execution, particularly in the flickering brushwork, this painting is still close to the work of his Impressionist years.

Gauguin’s rather romantic characterization of the solitary figure labouring in a garret establishes the tenor of much later self-portraits, in which he depicted himself as artistic martyr, culminating in the series of works of 1889 in which he increasingly identified with Christ.

The sitter of this painting was Tohotaua, the wife of the witch-doctor at Hiva Oa. The figure is strangely isolated in space, staring impassively forward with the static quality and crisply delineated shadows that suggest a photographic source. Indeed, Gauguin used a photo when working on the portrait.

The model for this work reappeared in Contes Barbares, but the painting itself was based on a photograph of the woman taken in 1901 and found in Gauguin’s effects after his death in Hiva Oa. Although the pose in the painted version is broadly similar to that in the photograph, Gauguin has made a number of important changes. Instead of coolly appraising the viewer as in the photograph, the woman here gazes into space. The pareo with which Tohotaua covered her breasts in the photograph, has been changed and the image becomes much more overtly erotic. The position of the fan has been moved slightly, so that it covers her right breast in a provocative fashion. In making these changes, Gauguin has constructed an image of an archetypal Polynesian woman, passive and sexually available.

The first paintings Gauguin produced in Tahiti prove that he found what he was seeking. In this painting a group of local people can be seen, sitting in semicircle, resting and chatting. The vanity of words - the title in the native language means “words, words” - falls silent in the pacifying music of colour.

Originally, the work was entitled Grape Harvest at Arles, but Gauguin later renamed it Human Anguish, lest its symbolic connotations be overlooked. The pose of the crouching female figure in the foreground was a direct quotation from a Peruvian mummy that Gauguin had seen in the ethnographic museum in Paris, and which was to recur in later works, most notably in Where Do We Come From. Her pose evokes grief and guilt, perhaps sexual guilt, ironically referred to in the abundance of the harvest which surrounds her. Indeed, the backdrop of the harvest is treated like water, with the suggestion of frothy waves in the foreground, which for Gauguin represented female sexual abandonment. The picture may be meant to evoke a post-seduction scene, a theme which Gauguin explored to its fullest in The Loss of Virginity.

That the scene, painted at the beginning of November 1888, was executed from the imagination and not from life is evident from the fact that the scene is peopled with Breton peasant women whom Gauguin could not have seen for several months.

This graceful and fresh work was executed on the Isle of Martinique. It was shown for the public in 1888 at the exhibition organized by Th�o van Gogh, who later purchased it.

This picture once belonged to one of Gauguin’s sketchbook (“Carnet de Tahiti”). It was sheet No. 11 before the sketchbook was taken apart and the sheets were sold separately.

The dating of this drawing is debated. Generally it is thought that it was executed during Gauguin’s stay in Brittany in 1894, however, it also dated by others to 1889 based on the stylistic similarities with other drawings made in that year.

This scene is taken from Polynesian mythology. The supreme god Oro fell in love with the beautiful Vairaumati and chose her to be the female progenitor of the people. In the picture, the smoking exotic beauty Vairaumati is waiting for her lover who is present in the form of a stone idol in the background.

The Moon and the Earth is Gauguin’s depiction of an ancient Polynesian myth, in which Hina, the female spirit of the Moon, implores Fatou, the male spirit of the Earth, to grant humans eternal life. It is a request Fatou resolutely denies.

The painting was included in the exhibition that Gauguin organized at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris in November 1893. The works exhibited were his most recent: a few sculptures, three paintings from Brittany and 41 from Tahiti. In the end, only 11 paintings were sold and the artist Degas bought Hina te Fatou.

Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings celebrate the lushness and mysterious splendour of his new environment. At the same time they are seldom correct pictures of Tahitian life, from an anthropological standpoint, but rather feature recastings and recombinations of objects and persons taken out of their normal settings, as was the case with several of his paintings done in Brittany.

The most important paintings executed during Gauguin’s first stay in Tahiti are the Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary) and The Spectre Watches over Her (Manao Tupapau). In Ia Orana Maria Gauguin places the Christian story into a setting where both the figures and the vegetation are Polynesian. A Tahitian woman, her young son, and two women standing nearby are shown in the obvious attitudes of the Virgin and Child with attendant saints or worshiping angels.

Once again Gauguin has returned to the theme of the effect of profound religious faith on an apparently simple people, which had preoccupied him in some of his most important Breton works. The apparently effortless fusion of Christian iconography with Tahitian subject matter is in fact carefully contrived, with the poses of the background figures lifted from the relief carving on the Javanese temple of Borobudur, photographs of which Gauguin had taken with him to Tahiti.

This small sculpture combines different materials. As well as wood, Gauguin made use of mother-of-pearl for the nimbus and pieces of bone for the teeth.

Gauguin’s spell in the South Sea Islands corresponded to a search for a mythical Eden, in which he endeavoured to recover a sense of the holy that had been destroyed by the Western world, a primitive naivety dominated by the antitheses of life and death.

Noa-Noa is Gauguin’s intimate journal of his first trip to Tahiti. Begun in 1892, after his first year in the islands, it was intended to stand as a record of his emotions and experiences in the new world. The journal contains sensuous woodblock prints and sketches.

In the autumn of 1888, van Gogh began a series of paintings depicting the public gardens in Arles, and this is a further instance of Gauguin’s choice of the same subject matter, painted in mid-November. However, the treatment is quite different: whereas van Gogh continued to paint from the motif, Gauguin’s version is highly stylised, based on the play of geometricized shapes, treated with bold washes of colour. The absence of any horizon or aerial perspective contributes to a flat picture surface, which owes something to the influence of Japanese art. The objects in the background (the pond, fountain and park bench) are seen as if from above whereas the elements in the foreground and middle distance (including the young trees packed in straw as protection against the frost) are viewed as if at eye-level. The woman in the foreground is Madame Ginoux, whom both van Gogh and Gauguin had already depicted. This is one of the works that Theo van Gogh acquired from Gauguin in the winter of 1888-89.

Ondine (or Undine) is a medieval love story of a water nymph and a knight, and the folly that results from their union. A romantic German novel entitled Undine, was written by Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la Motte Fouqu�. Gauguin’s painting is an illustration of a piece of reading.

In 1881, at the time of painting this work, Gauguin still had a successful career in stockbroking. The affluent lifestyle that this gave the family, including his wife Mette (probably the woman seated at the upright piano) and their four children is made clear in this painting. The solid bourgeois respectability is reflected in the cosy interior and the domestic comforts made evident in the foreground by the prominent still-life and the small work basket on the table.

This painting was included in the seventh Impressionist exhibition of 1882, where Gauguin exhibited 13 works, and which he helped to organize. In treatment, however, the painting is quite different from typical Impressionist works of this period. It is produced on a much larger scale than Gauguin normally used at this time, quite different from the smaller, more intimate works of his Impressionist friends who favoured portable canvases for working in the open air. The rather dark tonality was something that was remarked upon by several critics, who found it heavy in comparison with typical Impressionist paintings. It was perhaps because of its rather orthodox treatment and the image of family life that it proclaims that made Mette Gauguin keep the painting in her personal collection until 1917.

In October 1889, Gauguin settled in Marie Henry’s inn at Le Pouldu, an isolated village in Brittany. One after the other, he produced such works as The Yellow Christ, The Green Christ or The Calvary, La Belle Ang�le. These works showed that he was in full possession of his art, with an equally masterful control of vision, plastic form, and technique.

Things sacred are present in the background of Gauguin’s portraits, which he wanted to put in expressive harmony with the faces, according to the Symbolist doctrine which inspired also Van Gogh. Strange anguished faces are whirling around Meyer de Haan in Nirvana. Gauguin regarded things sacred as linked with a darkly virgin and barbaric power. The Idol was to bring him that which God no longer gave him.

Gauguin placed the first of his idols, motionless and mysterious, near the Belle Ang�le. He no doubt was inspired by the Chimu pottery of the northwest coast of Peru and its stirrup portrait vases. A branch of Gauguin’s family is Peruvian and there is definite evidence that he was familiar with Peruvian vases.

In the background of the painting is one of Gauguin’s ceramics.

This drawing is from the Breton Sketchbook, No. 16 (100.24 verso).

Devoid of the idyllic tone that marks the majority of Gauguin’s Tahitian works, this landscape with an undeciphered original title prompts thoughts of some mystic act performed at night. The shrill combinations of intense colours and the disturbing atmosphere of mystery anticipate the poetry and painting of the German Expressionists.

This drawing is from the Breton Sketchbook, No. 16 (100.4 recto).

This drawing is from the Breton Sketchbook, No. 16 (100.38 recto).

This drawing is from the Breton Sketchbook, No. 16 (100.38 verso).

In the two years that Gauguin spent in Paris between his trips to Tahiti he was occupied with a number of different projects, including the exhibition of his recent work at Durand-Ruel’s and the writing of Noa Noa. All this left him little time to seek out new motifs, and he fell back on favourite themes in an attempt to consolidate his exotic reputation. Mahana no atua was probably painted immediately after his exhibition and represents a fictionalised version of life in Tahiti, akin to that which he was creating for Noa Noa which drew largely on Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout’s Voyages aux Iles de Grand Ocean (first published in 1837) and which furnished Gauguin with ideas for his writings, paintings and carvings.

The figure of the god in the centre of the composition, around which the work revolves, is a composite of Moerenhout’s description of figures from Easter Island and those from Borobudur, of which he had photographs. The ritualistic aspect of the scene is enhanced by the use of a frieze-like arrangement of figures and by the work’s esoteric nature.

This work is probably a preliminary study for a larger, unknown painting. It is an extreme example of cloisonnism.

When Gauguin included this painting in the exhibition he mounted at Durand-Ruel’s gallery back in Paris in 1893, its price of 1500 francs was higher than that of any other work included in the show, demonstrating the importance he attached to it. Because of its exoticism it was a work that was guaranteed to appeal to a Parisian audience, and Gauguin’s careful inscription of the title onto the painting points to his control of his audience. The question seems to be posed by the woman in the background, of her companion whose desire to find a husband is suggested by the flower she is wearing behind her ear. That it should deal with the ritual surrounding Tahitian marriage was a clear attempt to appeal to an audience who would have recognized the subject of the eminently popular Marriage of Loti, which Gauguin had read and which helped shape contemporary Western perceptions about the languorous Tahitian women.

After the birth of his illegitimate children, the themes of birth and family life appear in Gauguin’s art. The present painting borrows a Christian motif to express the artist’s experience of fatherhood. The lying native woman with a halo around her head is perhaps the lover of the artist.

Returning to Paris from Tahiti Gauguin continued to depicts subjects from the South Seas, he painted his reminiscences of Tahiti.

In this painting everything speaks of eternity: the majestic poses of the heroines, the ancient idols, Eve and the apple, the Virgin Mary, and the simple Tahitian women all come together in a single space.

The most important paintings executed during Gauguin’s second stay in Tahiti are the Nevermore, The White Horse, and Two Tahitian Women. “Nevermore” is the refrain of The Raven, a famous poem published in 1875 by Edgar Allan Poe.

Nevermore is one of Gauguin’s monumental nude paintings. It reflects the depression by which the painter was overcome in 1897 which led to his attempted suicide. This work is a free adaptation of Manet’s Olympia, which Gauguin had copied before going to Tahiti in 1891. It attempts to suggest the superstitious dread of the Tahitian woman who lies alone in the foreground. Although Gauguin denied any association with Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, the links are too obvious to be overlooked, particularly since it would have been well-known in the literary circles within which Gauguin moved, and had been illustrated in translation by Manet.

In October 1888, Gauguin went to Arles on Vincent van Gogh’s invitation, to try and build up an artists’ community which van Gogh had long dreamed to create. Gauguin arrived on October 20. By December 25, all hopes had vanished, all plans were annihilated. There was the often told tragedy, van Gogh’s abortive murderous attempt, when he slashed his own ear. Gauguin fled without ever seeing again his tempestuous friend, who was always to feel bitter about this.

At Arles, Gauguin and van Gogh worked on the same subjects. Caf� at Arles (Madame Ginoux) Gauguin re-interpreted Van Gogh’s two paintings by joining together the Night Caf� and the Portrait of Madame Ginoux.

Early in November 1888 Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother that Gauguin was attempting a picture of the night caf� that he had already painted. Madame Ginoux was the proprietor of the Caf� de la Gare in Arles, where van Gogh had lodged upon his arrival in the Midi and the establishment was frequented by prostitutes, three of whom Gauguin has depicted in the background of his version.

Gauguin later reworked the canvas, adding the figure to the extreme lefthand side and the man conversing with the prostitutes. These two figures, and Madame Ginoux herself, had already been portrayed by Van Gogh in other works.

The work is signed in two places: on the marble table and on the edge of the billiard table.

This picture was painted during Gauguin’s stay in Le Pouldu, Brittany. Meyer de Haan (1852-1895) was a Dutch industrialist who sold his factory to his brothers and started to study painting. He settled in France. In Paris he met Pissarro, Theo van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin, whom De Haan accompanied to Brittany - first to Pont-Aven, and later to Le Pouldu, on the coast of Brittany.

Things sacred are present in the background of Gauguin’s portraits, which he wanted to put in expressive harmony with the faces, according to the Symbolist doctrine which inspired also Van Gogh. Strange anguished faces are whirling around Meyer de Haan in Nirvana. Gauguin regarded things sacred as linked with a darkly virgin and barbaric power.

Gauguin depicted Meyer de Haan several times in painting and in graphics. He is also represented in Gauguin’s late painting Barbaric Tales.

This composition is probably a complete invention of a mythic place of ancient sacrifice to a lost god. There exists a larger, more detailed painting of similar subject in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

This work was a gift for Gauguin’s first friend at Tahiti, the sailor Paulin J�not. He painted also a large picture of the same subject, however, the composition was so much changed that there is no relation between the painting and the watercolour.

Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings celebrate the lushness and mysterious splendour of his new environment. At the same time they are seldom correct pictures of Tahitian life, from an anthropological standpoint, but rather feature recastings and recombinations of objects and persons taken out of their normal settings, as was the case with several of his paintings done in Brittany.

This drawing contains the self-portraits of the two artists, Paul Gauguin and Camille Pissarro.

This is one of the several portraits which Gauguin painted of his beloved daughter, Aline.

Madeleine Bernard was the sister of the painter �mile Bernard, an important member of the Pont-Aven School of painters.

This drawing is from the Breton Sketchbook, No. 16 (100.24 verso).

During his final stay in Polynesia, Gauguin produced several depictions of idols, including the sculpture that was destined to be his tombstone. The impassionate idol rising above the tangle of vegetation embodied in the artist’s eyes the power of nature for which life and death are inseparable.

After he had moved to Hiva Oa in 1901, Gauguin returned to the theme of horse and rider, in two works that are clearly influenced by the Parisian racing scenes of Degas.

Due to the two riders in profile moving parallel to the horizon and blocking the movement of the other riders, the paintings are somewhat mysterious.

After he had moved to Hiva Oa in 1901, Gauguin returned to the theme of horse and rider, in two works that are clearly influenced by the Parisian racing scenes of Degas.

In October 1889 Gauguin returned to Le Pouldu, where he stayed at the inn of Marie Henry with Meyer de Haan. Shortly after their arrival, they began to decorate the inn’s dining room. The present work is part of the suite of decorative panels, along with the Caribbean Woman with Sunflowers. It formed the door of a cupboard with a portrait of Meyer de Haan opposite. These two works need to be read as a pair in order to appreciate the wealth of symbols they embody.

This Self-Portrait with elements of caricature is one of Gauguin’s most important and radical paintings. In it the painter seems to be melancholic. The background is filled with three Christian symbols: the apple, the halo, and the snake.

Gauguin’s head emerges from simplified yellow angel wings, which contrast with the red background, symbolizing the demonic side of his character. The apples and serpent are references to the garden of Eden, to temptation and to Milton’s Paradise Lost (the book was included in his portrait of Meyer de Haan). The sexual allusion of the apples may have been incorporated for more personal reasons - as a symbol of Gauguin’s jealousy at Meyer de Haan’s love affair with Marie Henry. Once again, Gauguin has freely plundered different cultural traditions in the interests of a strikingly bold, essentially decorative work, combining Christian iconography with the treatment found in Japanese prints.

Gauguin tackled the topic of the self-portrait during all phases of his artistic career. In the portrait painted in the winter of 1893-94 he shows himself in front of the bright yellow and green walls of is Paris apartment, which he had decorated with souvenirs of his first Tahiti journey. In the top right, in mirror image, the painting The Spectre Watches over Her can be seen.

Gauguin tackled the topic of the self-portrait during all phases of his artistic career. The present portrait, executed in 1896 in Tahiti after he had left France for ever, shows the painter as his shaded eyes are cast down and the head is turned to the side in earnest contemplation.

In this self-portrait the artist depicted himself in the pose of Christ.