The Player Schneklud

The Player Schneklud (1894) at the Baltimore Museum of Art depicts a specific person — Fritz Schneklud, a cellist in the Pont-Aven artistic community — whom Gauguin also referenced in the title of The Royal End (Upaupa schneklud). After returning from his first Tahitian stay, Gauguin was living in Brittany again and maintaining his social connections with the artistic community that had formed around Pont-Aven. The portrait of Schneklud as a cellist was a formal exercise in the figure with instrument — a genre with venerable history in European portraiture — and Gauguin's handling of the musician brings the Synthetist formal economy he had developed in Polynesia back to a French subject. The Baltimore Museum of Art's strong collection of European modernism, including this canvas alongside other significant Post-Impressionist works, reflects the Baltimore collecting tradition that also produced the Cone sisters' extraordinary Matisse collection held in the same institution.

Gauguin builds the musician's figure in warm reddish-brown tones, the cello a golden shape that anchors the centre of the composition. The brushwork alternates between tight, descriptive passages in the hands and face and broader, more schematic treatment in the clothing and background. The palette is more subdued than his tropical canvases.