Self-Portrait

Self-Portrait (1885) in the collection now recorded as Q1741629 was painted during one of the most difficult periods of Gauguin's life — the year after he had resigned from the stock exchange to paint full time, when his income had collapsed and his marriage was under extreme strain. He was in his late thirties, fully committed to painting as his primary activity but not yet having found the formal language that would make his reputation. The self-portrait as a genre demands exactly the kind of sustained, honest observation that Gauguin was capable of when his subjects interested him, and his own face was the most available subject for uninterrupted study. The Impressionist handling of this canvas — varied, direct brushwork responsive to observed tone and color — shows him technically accomplished within the style he was about to transform. Rembrandt's repeated self-portraiture across a lifetime was the precedent for this kind of sustained self-examination, and Gauguin made several self-portraits through his career that chart his evolving formal concerns as directly as they document his physical appearance.

The self-portrait is painted with the Impressionist approach of the mid-1880s — varied, responsive brushwork building form through colour modulation. The face is rendered with direct observation, the colour palette relatively naturalistic. No hint yet of the radical Synthetist simplifications that would transform his work within a few years. A competent, honest early work that shows Gauguin's solid grounding in Impressionist technique.