Two Children

Gauguin's Two Children of 1889 belongs to his post-Arles period in Brittany, painted during the months when he was processing the traumatic breakdown of his collaboration with Van Gogh and returning to the Breton subjects that had first given him his Synthetist vocabulary. Children in pairs offered compositional opportunities quite different from single-figure studies: the relationship between two small figures, their physical proximity and social dynamic, could be conveyed through the formal relationship between their simplified, outlined forms. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, which holds this canvas, has an interesting connection to Gauguin's personal history — his wife and children lived in Copenhagen, and his estrangement from them was a biographical reality that gave his depictions of Breton children a complex emotional resonance. He saw in the children of Brittany an uncorrupted directness of experience that civilization was in the process of destroying, and his Two Children, painted in the aftermath of the Arles crisis, carries the weight of that conviction with particular intensity.

Gauguin renders the two children with his mature Synthetist vocabulary — bold outlines defining the figures, color simplified toward expressive intensity. The relationship between the two children is conveyed through their proximity and posture rather than through narrative interaction. His handling of the children's faces maintains his characteristic psychological directness even within the simplified formal language of his late 1880s work.