Portrait, Presumed to be of Marie Lagadu

Gauguin's presumed portrait of Marie Lagadu belongs to his practice of painting the specific individuals of the Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu communities — local Breton women whose faces and characters he studied with the same intensity he brought to landscape and symbolic subjects. The tentative attribution reflects the historical difficulty of identifying Gauguin's sitters: many were local figures who left few documentary traces, and the portraits themselves offer no inscribed names. Marie Lagadu, if she was the subject, represented the type of Breton woman Gauguin consistently sought — physically present, psychologically direct, untouched by Parisian sophistication. His portrait approach in 1888 was fully Synthetist: bold outlines, simplified color, psychological penetration achieved not through academic modeling but through the intensity of formal decision. This contrasts sharply with the portrait tradition of the academic Salon, where psychological complexity was expressed through minutely observed tonal modulation; Gauguin achieved comparable depth through radically opposite formal means, anticipating the Expressionist portrait methods of the following generation.

Gauguin's portrait is handled with his characteristic bold outline and simplified color — the face modeled through relatively flat color areas defined by contour rather than through the tonal gradation of academic portraiture. His color choices in flesh rendering are deliberately non-naturalistic: the face's colors are enriched beyond their observed reality toward expressive intensity. The background is flattened to concentrate attention on the face.