Portrait of Ingeborg Thaulow

Portrait of Ingeborg Thaulow (c.1877) at an unknown location depicts the wife of the Norwegian painter Frits Thaulow — the brother-in-law of the Norwegian painter Christian Krogh — who was in the Parisian circle connected to Pissarro and the Impressionist group that Gauguin was joining in the late 1870s. The Thaulow family connection placed Gauguin within the Scandinavian artistic community in Paris that had close relationships with the French Impressionist circle, and the portrait commission from this social network reflected his growing reputation as a painter within the circle. By 1877 Gauguin was a regular exhibitor with the Impressionist group, and portrait commissions from socially connected sitters were beginning to come his way. The portrait's unknown current location suggests it passed through private hands without entering a major institutional collection.

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.