Portrait of the Painter Slewinski

Portrait of the Painter Slewinski (c.1891) at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo depicts Władysław Ślewiński, a Polish painter who was among the most devoted of Gauguin's Pont-Aven disciples. Ślewiński had come to Brittany specifically to work with Gauguin, whom he revered, and became one of the most faithful practitioners of the Synthetist approach in his subsequent career. Gauguin's portrait of him was a gesture of collegial recognition within the Pont-Aven circle — the master acknowledging a committed student who was genuinely applying the formal lessons being developed there. The National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, which holds this canvas alongside significant French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works as part of the Japanese government's systematic collecting of Western art history, provides Tokyo with documentation of the Pont-Aven circle's social and artistic world alongside the more iconic Tahitian subjects.

The face is rendered with Gauguin's characteristic simplification — planes of color contained by bold outlines, a direct, uncompromising gaze. The background is minimal, focusing attention on the face and expression. The handling shows his full command of Synthetist portraiture: psychologically present and formally assured.