Madame Alexandre Kohler

Gauguin's portrait of Madame Alexandre Kohler, painted around 1887–1888, belongs to the period of his closest engagement with Impressionism before the Pont-Aven breakthrough. The Kohler portraits represent his most formally conventional period — seated bourgeois women in domestic settings, rendered with the psychological restraint of Manet's female portraits. Gauguin would soon abandon this social territory entirely for the Breton peasants of Pont-Aven and ultimately the Tahitian women of his Pacific exile, but these Parisian portraits show the social world he was rejecting as much as the aesthetic one.

The sitter is rendered with Manet-influenced directness — frontal, psychologically closed, dressed in dark clothing against a neutral ground. The handling is more finished than Gauguin's Impressionist landscapes, with smoother transitions in the face. The chair and background are kept subsidiary to the dominant presence of the sitter.