Young Girl With Fan

Young Girl with Fan (1902) at Museum Folkwang in Essen was painted during what proved to be Gauguin's final full year of productive work on the Marquesas before his death in May 1903. The fan as an object carried multiple cultural associations: it was a Japanese decorative art form he had been collecting since the mid-1880s, a Polynesian craft object used in traditional ceremonies, and a mark of feminine grace in the Western painting tradition from Velázquez through the Impressionists. Its appearance in this late figure painting creates a layered cultural reference that was typical of his mature Polynesian imagery. Museum Folkwang's early acquisition of this and other Gauguins under Karl Ernst Osthaus placed the Essen institution among the most prescient collectors of the Post-Impressionist generation in early twentieth-century Germany, at a time when most German museums were still focused on their national traditions.

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.