Poor Fisherman

Poor Fisherman (1896) at the São Paulo Museum of Art is among the quieter, more contemplative works from Gauguin's second Tahitian stay. The solitary fisherman in his canoe — isolated on the still water, reduced to a small human presence in an expanse of sea and sky — carries the meditative quality of a work by someone facing serious physical and psychological difficulties. By 1896 his health was declining and the financial pressures of his Pacific life were constant; the figure alone on the water may reflect something of his own sense of isolation from the European art world he had left behind. The São Paulo Museum of Art holds this canvas as part of a collection of European modernism that was built with unusual ambition in Brazil in the mid-twentieth century through the efforts of curator Pietro Maria Bardi and the patronage of the Chateaubriand newspaper empire. Its possession of a major late Gauguin alongside significant works by other Post-Impressionists makes it the most important collection of European modernism in South America.

The lone canoe and figure are placed in an expanse of water that fills much of the composition with reflective stillness. The water surface is rendered in flat, subtly varied tones of blue-green that mirror the sky above. The figure is small against the aquatic expanse, reinforcing the elemental loneliness of the composition. Gauguin's characteristic colour warmth softens what might otherwise be a stark, minimalist scene.