Portrait of Philibert Favre

Gauguin's 1885 portrait of Philibert Favre depicts a figure from the bourgeois Parisian world he was in the process of abandoning — a friend or acquaintance from the professional social milieu of a former stockbroker who was becoming an artist. The tension between these two identities is part of the biographical context of Gauguin's 1885 portraits: he had lost his banking career in the 1882 financial crisis and was struggling to establish himself as a painter, still moving between the bourgeois social world that had formed him and the bohemian artistic world he was entering. His portraits from this period show the Impressionist training of his Pissarro years still operative, but his psychological engagement with his sitters already shows the directness that would define his mature portraiture. The specificity of a named sitter — Philibert Favre, presumably a real individual from his social circle — connects the painting to the documentary tradition of portraiture as social record, a tradition Gauguin would increasingly abandon as his primitivist project led him away from the specific named individuals of his former life toward the universal types he sought in Brittany and Polynesia.

Gauguin's 1885 portrait shows his Impressionist-influenced handling still operative — the face modeled through tonal observation, the brushwork varied and responsive to the quality of light. His compositional instincts are already more deliberate than pure Impressionism would require, and his palette shows the warming and enrichment that would characterize his Synthetist period. The psychological engagement with his subject is consistent throughout his portraiture.