Portrait of a Man

Gauguin's 1888 portraits from Pont-Aven belong to the year of his most concentrated theoretical and formal development — the summer when he and Émile Bernard worked out the Cloisonnist approach that would define Post-Impressionist figure painting. This portrait of a man demonstrates his conviction, articulated explicitly in his letters and notebooks, that color and form could express psychological states directly without recourse to academic modeling or Impressionist optical analysis. His 1888 Self-Portrait as Les Misérables, exchanged with Van Gogh that autumn, shows how far this psychological intensity extended to his own self-image. The male portrait gave him a subject stripped of the decorative possibilities of the Breton women's traditional dress, requiring that psychological depth be carried entirely by formal means: the weight of the outline, the non-naturalistic color of the face, the simplified background concentrating attention on the sitter's inner life. Contemporaries such as Émile Bernard and Charles Laval were exploring similar territory, but Gauguin's combination of psychological penetration with formal boldness set his portraits apart.

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.