Old Man with a Stick

Gauguin's 'Old Man with a Stick' (1888) is among his most psychologically penetrating Breton figure studies — an aged Breton peasant depicted with the unsentimental directness he brought to all his human subjects. The old man with his walking stick is a figure of social dignity and individual character within the rural world Gauguin inhabited at Pont-Aven. His approach to aged subjects was consistently respectful — he saw in the Breton elders the same quality of authentic, unaffected life he sought throughout his career, the opposite of the Parisian sophistication he was escaping.

Gauguin renders the aged face with his Synthetist approach — the bold outlines and simplified color areas that characterized his mature Pont-Aven work applied to a subject that required psychological observation as well as formal clarity. The old man's face, with its lines and individual character, is treated with the same formal boldness as his landscape subjects, the psychological depth conveyed through the directness of the observation rather than through conventional academic modeling.