Madame Mette Gauguin in Evening Dress

Painted in 1884, this formal portrait of Gauguin's Danish wife Mette Sophie Gad depicts her in bourgeois evening dress at a moment when the couple's comfortable Copenhagen life was beginning to unravel. Gauguin had resigned from the Bourse in 1883 to paint full time, and by 1884 the family had relocated to Mette's home city seeking financial stability—a move that failed. The portrait conveys middle-class respectability even as Gauguin was abandoning that world entirely. Now held in Oslo's National Museum, it stands as one of the few formal records of his first decade of painting and of his marriage before the definitive separations of 1885.

The composition follows French Salon portrait conventions Gauguin had absorbed from Manet and Degas: the figure is placed against a shallow, darkened ground with soft modelling in the face. The brushwork in the dress fabric is relatively smooth, showing his not-yet-radical approach to paint handling at this stage.