Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin

Painted in 1889 after Gauguin's second Pont-Aven stay and during his time with van Gogh at Arles, this panel is a conscious homage to and reworking of Gustave Courbet's famous 1854 painting Bonjour Monsieur Courbet. Gauguin replaces Courbet's confident self-presentation with his own cloaked, wandering figure meeting a Breton peasant woman, transforming the Realist source into a meditation on the solitary outsider artist. Held at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, it demonstrates Gauguin's practice of art-historical quotation in service of personal symbolism. The dark, wet Breton landscape emphasises alienation from bourgeois certainty.

Painted on panel with the bold, simplified drawing that characterises his post-Arles Synthetist work. The figures are outlined with dark contours against a bleak, simplified landscape of grey-green and dark brown, with almost no atmospheric recession—a deliberately flat, icon-like pictorial space.