Two Children

Gauguin's 'Two Children' (1889) belongs to his post-Arles period — painted after the traumatic collaboration with Van Gogh and during his return to Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu. His depictions of children in the Breton environment were among his most sympathetic figure subjects, the children's unself-consciousness and physical directness reflecting the quality of authentic, unmediated experience he sought throughout his artistic life. Two children together provided compositional opportunities to explore the relationship between figures while maintaining the simplicity of his Synthetist approach.

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.