Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ

Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ (1899-1900) at the Musée d'Orsay is among Gauguin's most self-referential and conceptually layered self-portraits, showing him flanked by two of his own works: a ceramic self-portrait figure in the foreground and the Yellow Christ painting in the background. The inclusion of the Yellow Christ in his own portrait was an act of explicit self-positioning within the artist-as-Christ mythology that had run through his self-portraits since 1889, but the ceramic figure complicates the reading: it is a deliberately primitive-looking ceramic, modeled by Gauguin himself, that placed his self-image in the register of archaic or non-Western craft rather than academic fine art portraiture. The Orsay's possession of this complex self-portrait alongside other major Gauguins from both his Breton and Tahitian periods allows the full development of his self-mythologizing to be traced within a single institution.

Gauguin applied paint in broad, flat planes of non-naturalistic color bounded by dark contour lines — a style he called Synthetism. His palette is saturated and expressive: deep carmines, cadmium yellows, tropical greens, and acid blue-purples.