Old Man with a Stick

Gauguin's 1888 portrait of an old Breton man with a stick is one of his most psychologically penetrating figure studies, capturing a subject that embodied everything he had come to value in the Breton world. The aged peasant with a walking stick is a figure of slow, earned dignity, his worn face and deliberate movement the opposite of Parisian haste and superficiality. Gauguin's portraits of elderly Bretons consistently refuse the condescending pathos or picturesque charm with which academic painters typically treated peasant subjects; instead they insist on the sitter's full human gravity, treating the aged face with the same formal boldness and psychological seriousness he brought to any subject. The 1888 date places this portrait in his most productive Pont-Aven season, when his Cloisonnist method was fully operational. The Petit Palais in Paris holds this canvas, representing one of the municipal collection's acquisitions of Post-Impressionist work as the reputation of the movement solidified in the early twentieth century.

Gauguin renders the aged face with his Synthetist approach — the bold outlines and simplified color areas that characterized his mature Pont-Aven work applied to a subject that required psychological observation as well as formal clarity. The old man's face, with its lines and individual character, is treated with the same formal boldness as his landscape subjects, the psychological depth conveyed through the directness of the observation rather than through conventional academic modeling.