Portrait of Jacob Meyer de Haan

Portrait of Jacob Meyer de Haan (1889) at the Museum of Modern Art is among the most psychologically complex works in Gauguin's production. De Haan, a Dutch-Jewish painter who had come to Le Pouldu specifically to work with Gauguin, was financing his host's time in Brittany — a financial dependency that complicated their relationship. Gauguin depicted de Haan with deliberate symbolic distortion, the books on the table (Sartor Resartus and Paradise Lost) identifying him as a Faustian intellectual who had traded spiritual freedom for worldly knowledge. The demonic quality of the portrait's treatment — the intense gaze, the hunched posture, the dramatic background — reflects Gauguin's ambivalent fascination with de Haan as a figure of intelligence whose Jewishness and bookishness he associated with a specifically European, rationalist consciousness he was trying to escape. MoMA's possession of this canvas as a key work of the Post-Impressionist period acknowledges its importance as both a formal achievement and a troubling document of Gauguin's increasingly explicit primitivist ideology.

The figure is painted with bold Synthetist simplification — the clenched fists, hunched posture, and exaggerated features creating a caricature of intellectual intensity. Deep reds and oranges glow in the background. The books on the table are clearly rendered but the figure itself is psychologically distorted, the face made demonic through deliberate exaggeration of its characteristic features.