Mother and daughter

Gauguin's Mother and Daughter — likely a Breton subject from his Pont-Aven period (1886–1889) — belongs to the series of domestic figures he painted in Brittany as he was developing his Synthetist formal language. The Breton peasant women appealed to him as subjects possessing an archaic dignity that the modern Parisian figure lacked, and he insisted on their headdresses, aprons, and Sunday clothes as markers of a pre-modern social order he was simultaneously idealisingand departing from. These maternal subjects in Brittany form a transitional point between his Impressionist figure studies and the monumental female figures of Tahiti.

The figures are rendered with simplified, flattened forms that anticipate the full Synthetist flattening of the Tahitian works. The Breton costume — dark dress, white coiffe — provides strong tonal contrast. The handling is more deliberate and less spontaneous than the Impressionist landscapes of his earlier period.