Deathbed portrait of Aristide 'Atiti' Suhas, died 5 March 1892, 1.5 years old

Deathbed Portrait of Aristide 'Atiti' Suhas (1892) at the Kröller-Müller Museum is one of the most specific and documentary works in Gauguin's entire production — a portrait of a specific named infant, the son of a Tahitian family, painted on the day of his death at eighteen months old. In Noa Noa, Gauguin described the child's death and his drawing of the small body as an act of memorial attention. The conversion of this intimate tragedy into a painted record placed him within a tradition of deathbed portraiture that had ancient roots in European art — the detailed recording of a face shortly after death as a permanent memorial — but the Polynesian context and the subject's infancy gave it a specific quality quite unlike conventional European deathbed portraiture. The Kröller-Müller Museum, which holds this unusual canvas as part of its extraordinary Post-Impressionist collection alongside major Van Goghs and other works, preserves one of the most humanly direct documents in Gauguin's Polynesian production.

The child's form is painted with unusual delicacy for Gauguin — the pale flesh tones carefully modulated, the features rendered with tender attention. The surrounding setting is handled more broadly. The composition is intimate and concentrated, the small figure central and surrounded by the warm colors of Tahitian textiles and vegetation.