Paul Gauguin

Jacques Tasset, Montmorency

Madeleine & B. Bernard Kreisler, Greenwich (acquired circa 1959)

Mrs. John N. Weinstock, New Orleans (by descent from the above in 1976 and sold: Christie's, New York, November 4, 2003, lot 14)

Acquired at the above sale

New Orleans, New Orleans Museum of Art (on extended loan)

Miami, Center for the Fine Arts; Wilmington, Delaware Art Museum; Memphis, Dixon Gallery and Gardens; Michigan, Edsel & Eleanor Ford House; Oklahoma, Oklahoma City Art Museum & Seattle, Seattle Art Museum, French Paintings of Three Centuries from the New Orleans Museum of Art, 1991-93, n.n., illustrated in the catalogue 

New Orleans, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Art for a New Building, 1993, illustrated in color in the catalogue 

Hartford, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Gauguin's Nirvana, Painters at Le Pouldu 1889-1990, 2001, no. 24, illustrated in color in the catalogue

Georges Wildenstein, Gauguin, Paris, 1964, vol. I, no. 334, illustrated p. 128

Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Gauguin's Religious Themes, Ph.D. dissertation, Hebrew University, 1969, no. 62, illustrated p. 168

Ronald Pickvance, The Drawings of Gauguin, London, 1970, p. 26 & illustrated p. 11 & pl. 33

Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski, Gauguin in the Context of Symbolism, Princeton, PhD thesis, 1975, p. 228

Henri Dorra, "Le Texte Wagner de Paul Gauguin" in Bulletin de l'Historie de l'Art Français, 1984, p. 286

Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski & Travers H. Newton, Jr., Technique and Meaning in the Paintings of Paul Gauguin, Cambridge, 2000, illustrated pp. 142-43

Gloria Groom, ed., Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist (exhibition catalogue), Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago & Grand Palais, Paris, 2017-18, illustrated in color p. 62

Eve Bretonne (II) is a stunningly worked pastel and chalk composition from a critical period in Gauguin’s oeuvre, just before his first trip to Tahiti. After a personally explosive yet prolific stay with Van Gogh in Arles at the end of 1888, Gauguin looked forward to returning to Pont-Aven where he had sojourned on several previous occasions. Arriving in June of 1889, however, Gauguin found the town too full – both with holiday seekers and other artists. He set off for Le Pouldu, a small hamlet more than forty kilometers down the cost from the bustle of Pont-Aven. In this small village he found houses scattered among the dunes and a small inn run by Marie Henry. Here he focused on rocks and water, on young girls herding cows and on the farmyards of the town’s scattered buildings. Gauguin was attracted to what he saw as an “untouched” way of life, the regional dress and festivities which he had explored on earlier visits to Pont-Aven, reinforced by the ancient origins of the town, settled before the Romans occupied modern-day France.

During his stay in Le Pouldu, where he was joined by other artists including Jacob Meijer de Haan, Gauguin worked on several types of female figures, which would reappear in his works for the remainder of his career. These included the figure in Eve Bretonne (II) as well as the figure of a bather with her back to the viewer, facing the ocean in the background, an embodiment of Ondine. The inspiration for the pose of the figure in Eve Bretonne (II) comes from sketches Gauguin made of a Peruvian mummy that he viewed at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris. In archival photographs from the museum’s galleries one can see that the mummy sits on its heels, knees held in towards its chin, its head held up between its hands. In a contemporaneous work of the figure of Eve, Gauguin’s used watercolor as a medium and portrayed the figure of Eve with her back pressed against a tree, shielding her face from a serpent which cranes itself around the trunk towards her. Other details of the setting are ambiguous, though flat, bright patches of color provide a varied background markedly different from the purely ambiguous place found in Eve Bretonne (II).

In Vie et mort and Nirvana: Portrait de Meyer de Haan, the Eve figure reappears again – in each case modified for the composition. In Vie et mort her flesh tones have been markedly shifted towards a greenish-gray to align the figure with the personification of death whereas in Nirvana: Portrait of Meyer de Haan Eve’s face is given more portrait like qualities to represent the figure of De Haans’ love interest at the time, the innkeeper Marie Henry. The figure to the right, red hair hanging down her back takes on the other prime female figure of this time, the bather, Ondine, heading towards the wave of the nearby ocean. The use of religious subject matter in Gauguin’s works was fairly common during these years and biblical references would continue to emerge in his works executed in Tahiti. Contemporaneous imagery of Jacob wrestling with the Angel, The Descent from the Cross, and Christ in the Garden of Olives populated his canvases in the late 1880s.

Examining Gauguin’s repeated use of figure-types, Ronald Pickvance has asserted “Perhaps the most interesting example of Gauguin’s persistent use of a pose is that of the seated nude woman whom we first encounter in a drawing of 1889 [Eve Bretonne II]. She was first transformed into a figure of Eve, and then became a symbol of Death in a painting where a second nude symbolizes Life. As such, the two figures occupy the background of Nirvana. She next appeared, more frontally posed, in a carved wood relief…. Even in Tahiti the image persisted for Gauguin—in a painting of 1892, in two woodcuts, and finally in Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Of 1897” (R. Pickvance, Op. cit, p. 11). In the final canvas mentioned by Pickvance, Gauguin’s monumental Tahitian masterpiece, this figure is at the far left of the canvas, her faced wrinkled and hair turned white. She again, painted almost ten years later, symbolizes death.