The woman with the hair knots

Gauguin's Woman with Hair Knots of 1886 treats the traditional Breton women's coiffure — the elaborate arrangements of hair that marked the specific regional identity of different parts of Brittany — as both a formal subject and a cultural observation. The distinctive hairstyles of Breton women, requiring skill and time to arrange and signifying specific local identities within the broader Breton world, were precisely the kind of traditional practice that attracted Gauguin to the region as an alternative to Parisian modernity. His figure subjects from this period show him developing the formal tools that would serve his mature work: the tendency to treat a single strong formal element — here the hair knot — as the compositional anchor of the figure, around which all other elements were organized. The Artizon Museum in Tokyo holds this canvas, representing the Japanese collecting interest in Post-Impressionist work that developed in the early twentieth century and that had an interesting historical irony: Gauguin had partly developed his Synthetist formal language through study of Japanese prints, and his work eventually entered Japanese collections.

Gauguin renders the woman with his characteristic transitional technique of the mid-1880s — not yet fully Synthetist but already moving beyond Impressionist optical analysis toward a bolder, more simplified treatment of form. The hair knot creates a strong geometric element within the portrait's composition, the carefully dressed hair asserting its formal presence against the face. His palette shows his growing preference for richer, warmer tones than Impressionist convention permitted.