Portrait of a Child (maybe Aline Gauguin)

Portrait of a Child (maybe Aline Gauguin, c.1877) at an unknown location may depict Gauguin's daughter Aline, born in 1877 — one of the five children of his marriage to Mette-Sophie Gad who would die young, in Aline's case in 1897 at the age of twenty. Gauguin's relationship with his children was complicated by his artistic commitments: he effectively abandoned them after his separation from Mette in 1885, and Aline's death — which he learned of by letter in Tahiti — produced one of the most grief-stricken passages in his late writing. If this portrait does depict Aline, it was made in the year of her birth, before the family ruptures that would characterize his later life. The portrait of an infant or young child was a conventional domestic subject for any painter, and Gauguin's versions of his own children from the 1870s and early 1880s document the domestic world he was simultaneously creating and preparing to abandon.

Gauguin applied paint in broad, flat areas of strong color bounded by firm contour lines — a technique he called Synthetism, derived partly from medieval stained glass and Japanese prints. His palette is deliberately non-naturalistic, using vivid magentas, ochres.