Young Girl With Fan

Young Girl With Fan was painted during Gauguin's second Tahitian stay (1902) and belongs to his final series of single-figure portraits of Polynesian women. The fan — a portable, decorative object connecting Polynesian craft tradition with the decorative vocabulary Gauguin had absorbed from Japanese sources — appears in several of his Tahitian figure paintings as an element that bridges cultural reference systems. By 1902 Gauguin was in deteriorating health and increasingly remote from any art market, and these late works have a quality of resigned mastery — technically impeccable but without the urgency of his earlier programmatic ambition.

The figure is rendered with the monumental calm of Gauguin's late figure style. The fan provides a flat, decorative element that echoes the Japanese printmaking Gauguin had absorbed from the 1880s onward. The background is treated as a flat colour field that integrates with rather than separating from the figure.