Mette Asleep on a Sofa

Mette Asleep on a Sofa (1875) at an unknown current location is among the most intimate of Gauguin's early works, a private domestic study of his recently married wife in a moment of unguarded repose. He and Mette-Sophie Gad had married in 1873, and this 1875 canvas documents the early years of their marriage when Gauguin was still a prosperous stockbroker with a comfortable bourgeois household on the Rue de la Bruyère in Paris. The sleeping figure as a subject had a distinguished history in Impressionism — Degas's sleeping women, Morisot's domestic interiors — and Gauguin's version reflects his immersion in the Impressionist tradition through Pissarro and through the collection his guardian Arosa was building. The tender observation of the sleeping wife in an informal domestic setting is qualitatively different from the formal portraiture he would later produce of the same sitter, and its survival provides a rare glimpse of the domestic life he would systematically dismantle in pursuit of his artistic career.

The horizontal figure is treated with soft, blended brushwork and a warm, domestic colour scheme of ochres and browns. Gauguin avoids sharp contours, keeping the image hazy and atmospheric in the Impressionist manner, with loose strokes building the sofa fabric and the figure's resting form.