Mother and daughter

Mother and Daughter (c.1886-89) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art belongs to Gauguin's sustained engagement with Breton domestic subjects during his multiple Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu periods. The maternal subject — a woman with her child — carries the weight of a tradition running from Renaissance Madonnas through nineteenth-century genre painting, and Gauguin's treatment of it in a Breton context was part of his project of finding archaic authenticity in the older peasant culture of western Brittany. The Breton women in their distinctive headdresses and traditional dress seemed to him to embody a pre-modern social order that the metropolitan sophistication of Paris had destroyed, and the mother-daughter pairing invoked the elemental relationship of generations that he associated with this pre-modern world. The Metropolitan's possession of this canvas alongside its major Tahitian Gauguins allows the continuity of his formal and cultural concerns across different geographical settings to be traced: the Breton peasant woman and the Tahitian woman were both projections of his primitivist ideology, different in their specific cultural context but continuous in the formal language he developed to represent them.

The figures are rendered with simplified, flattened forms that anticipate the full Synthetist flattening of the Tahitian works. The Breton costume — dark dress, white coiffe — provides strong tonal contrast. The handling is more deliberate and less spontaneous than the Impressionist landscapes of his earlier period.