Portrait, Presumed to be of Marie Lagadu

Gauguin's portrait of Marie Lagadu (presumed, 1888) belongs to the tradition of Pont-Aven painter portraits — likenesses of the local Breton community that served as demonstrations of his Synthetist approach applied to the human face. The tentative attribution reflects the complexity of identifying Gauguin's sitters, many of whom were local figures without documentary records. His portraits from this period are notable for their psychological directness and their refusal of conventional portrait flattery — the sitters rendered with the same bold simplification he brought to landscape and still life.

Gauguin's portrait is handled with his characteristic bold outline and simplified color — the face modeled through relatively flat color areas defined by contour rather than through the tonal gradation of academic portraiture. His color choices in flesh rendering are deliberately non-naturalistic: the face's colors are enriched beyond their observed reality toward expressive intensity. The background is flattened to concentrate attention on the face.