Mette Asleep on a Sofa

This intimate 1875 canvas depicting Gauguin's wife Mette asleep on a sofa is among his earliest surviving works and shows the private domestic world of his first years as an amateur painter. The subject—a reclining sleeping figure—was a common Impressionist motif, used by Degas and Morisot to explore informal domestic interiors and the unguarded moment. For Gauguin, painting his wife was both a training exercise and an act of observation within the bourgeois home he was simultaneously beginning to chafe against. The tender, unstudied quality of the composition distinguishes it from his later monumental figure paintings.

The horizontal figure is treated with soft, blended brushwork and a warm, domestic colour scheme of ochres and browns. Gauguin avoids sharp contours, keeping the image hazy and atmospheric in the Impressionist manner, with loose strokes building the sofa fabric and the figure's resting form.