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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Paul Gauguin Digital Catalogue Raisonné, currently being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc.
During the two years that Gauguin spent in France between his first, epic journey to Tahiti and his final flight from western civilization in June 1895, his abiding ambition was to elucidate and disseminate to the Parisian public the enigmatic body of work that he had brought back from the South Seas. He devoted himself to arranging exhibitions, preparing the text and illustrations for his memoir Noa Noa, and creating variations in watercolor, pastel, woodcut, and monotype of his defining Tahitian paintings. “His most productive efforts can be loosely categorized as ‘image translations,’” Richard Brettell has written, “suggesting that the transformation was more important to Gauguin than the reproduction of his original intentions” (The Art of Paul Gauguin, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 330).
The artist based the present watercolor on his 1891 oil painting Te faaturuma, which depicts a seated Tahitian woman—presumably his native companion Tehamana—in a classic pose of pensive melancholy (Wildenstein, no. 440; Worcester Art Museum). This figure embodied for Gauguin the slower, non-Western pace of the island and hinted at a mysterious dimension in the life of its indigenous inhabitants. “Nothing but this silence!” he wrote to his wife Mette. “I understand why these people can remain hours and days sitting immobile and gazing sadly at the sky. It seems to me as if the turmoil of Europe exists no longer, and tomorrow it will be the same, and so on until the end” (M. Malingue, ed., Paul Gauguin: Letters to his Wife and Friends, Boston, 2003, p. 163).
Gauguin likely painted the present Boudeuse at Pont-Aven during summer 1894, following an assault by local sailors that left him confined to bed, working exclusively in light, portable materials. Instead of replicating the interior setting of the oil, he substituted a landscape background that evokes a tropical Garden of Eden. The juxtaposition of complementary hues heightens the vibrancy of the image, while the delicate, stippled application of color—inspired, perhaps, by the experimental watercolor transfer technique that he pioneered during this period—conveys the impression of a daydream or memory rather than a scene rendered from life.
The irregular shape of the sheet resembles an architectural pendentive, which supports a dome over a square space. In selecting this format, Gauguin may have had in mind Delacroix’s decorations for the Palais Bourbon—he owned a facsimile of a pencil study for the Adam and Eve pendentive, which appears in the background of Wildenstein, no. 257—or Michelangelo’s murals in the Sistine Chapel. “Could Gauguin here have contemplated Tehamana as a Michelangelesque Sibyl,” Charles Stuckey has postulated, “with some secret knowledge inaccessible to over-civilized Europeans?” (exh. cat., op. cit., 2007, p. 318). The pendentive shape also suggests that Gauguin, during his convalescence at Pont-Aven, may have fantasized about creating a decorative ensemble based on his Tahitian imagery, perhaps for a local chapel.
During the two years that Gauguin spent in France between his first, epic journey to Tahiti and his final flight from western civilization in June 1895, his abiding ambition was to elucidate and disseminate to the Parisian public the enigmatic body of work that he had brought back from the South Seas. He devoted himself to arranging exhibitions, preparing the text and illustrations for his memoir Noa Noa, and creating variations in watercolor, pastel, woodcut, and monotype of his defining Tahitian paintings. “His most productive efforts can be loosely categorized as ‘image translations,’” Richard Brettell has written, “suggesting that the transformation was more important to Gauguin than the reproduction of his original intentions” (The Art of Paul Gauguin, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 330).
The artist based the present watercolor on his 1891 oil painting Te faaturuma, which depicts a seated Tahitian woman—presumably his native companion Tehamana—in a classic pose of pensive melancholy (Wildenstein, no. 440; Worcester Art Museum). This figure embodied for Gauguin the slower, non-Western pace of the island and hinted at a mysterious dimension in the life of its indigenous inhabitants. “Nothing but this silence!” he wrote to his wife Mette. “I understand why these people can remain hours and days sitting immobile and gazing sadly at the sky. It seems to me as if the turmoil of Europe exists no longer, and tomorrow it will be the same, and so on until the end” (M. Malingue, ed., Paul Gauguin: Letters to his Wife and Friends, Boston, 2003, p. 163).
Gauguin likely painted the present Boudeuse at Pont-Aven during summer 1894, following an assault by local sailors that left him confined to bed, working exclusively in light, portable materials. Instead of replicating the interior setting of the oil, he substituted a landscape background that evokes a tropical Garden of Eden. The juxtaposition of complementary hues heightens the vibrancy of the image, while the delicate, stippled application of color—inspired, perhaps, by the experimental watercolor transfer technique that he pioneered during this period—conveys the impression of a daydream or memory rather than a scene rendered from life.
The irregular shape of the sheet resembles an architectural pendentive, which supports a dome over a square space. In selecting this format, Gauguin may have had in mind Delacroix’s decorations for the Palais Bourbon—he owned a facsimile of a pencil study for the Adam and Eve pendentive, which appears in the background of Wildenstein, no. 257—or Michelangelo’s murals in the Sistine Chapel. “Could Gauguin here have contemplated Tehamana as a Michelangelesque Sibyl,” Charles Stuckey has postulated, “with some secret knowledge inaccessible to over-civilized Europeans?” (exh. cat., op. cit., 2007, p. 318). The pendentive shape also suggests that Gauguin, during his convalescence at Pont-Aven, may have fantasized about creating a decorative ensemble based on his Tahitian imagery, perhaps for a local chapel.