Madame Mette Gauguin in Evening Dress

Madame Mette Gauguin in Evening Dress (1884) at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo is a formal portrait of Gauguin's Danish wife at one of the last moments of their shared domestic life. By 1884 the family had moved to Copenhagen at Mette's insistence after Gauguin's departure from the Bourse had left them financially precarious, and he was attempting to establish himself as an artist in a city that was not interested in his work. The portrait of Mette in evening dress documents the bourgeois social world she was trying to maintain even as her husband's commitment to painting was making that world increasingly untenable. Gauguin's portraiture at this date showed real competence within the conventional portrait tradition — the smooth handling of the face, the attention to the dress fabric, the neutral background — while anticipating none of the radical departures that were just a few years away. The Oslo museum, holding this canvas alongside the 1884 Nasturtiums and Dahlias, preserves two aspects of the same moment: Gauguin's personal world and his artistic world simultaneously in transition.

The composition follows French Salon portrait conventions Gauguin had absorbed from Manet and Degas: the figure is placed against a shallow, darkened ground with soft modelling in the face. The brushwork in the dress fabric is relatively smooth, showing his not-yet-radical approach to paint handling at this stage.