All artworks

Head of a Tahitian Woman in Profile, c. 1891, Monogrammed upper right COLNAGHI ELLIOTT

Paul Gauguin

Exhibited by Colnaghi Elliott Master Drawings

Material Coloured chalks and pastel, heightened with touches of gold paint

Dimensions 31 × 21 cm

Place of Creation Tahiti

Status Vetted

About the Work

In June 1891, Paul Gauguin arrived in Tahiti, intending to make it his permanent home. His first stay lasted two years before a brief return to France, but he was back by 1895 and remained there until 1901, when he moved to the Marquesas. During his early Tahitian period, from 1891 to 1893, he devoted the first months to drawing the people and landscapes of the island. These studies were meant as material for future paintings. In a letter to Paul Sérusier from November 1891, he wrote that he was working hard and producing a great deal of research, even if he had not yet completed a painting. Among the works from this period is a series of powerful portrait drawings of Tahitian women, usually in charcoal and likely intended as independent works. The present sheet is more refined than most of these and uses pastel and coloured chalks, a medium Gauguin had explored since his early career and continued to use until the end of the decade.

The drawing relates closely to Gauguin’s painting Te Nave Nave Fenua, created during his first Tahitian stay and now in the Ohara Museum of Art in Kurashiki, Japan. Painted around April and May of 1892 and exhibited in Paris the following year, it was later acquired by Roderic O’Conor. Although the present sheet is not a direct study for the figure in the painting, both works include a bird-like lizard or chimera beside the woman’s head. This creature has often been understood as an allusion to the Biblical temptation of Eve, reimagined within a Polynesian setting. A contemporary critic described the painting as an exotic orchard that tempts an island Eve while the chimera whispers at her temple.

Gauguin revisited this subject in several drawings, watercolours and prints, including a colour woodcut from 1893 to 1894. A small watercolour detail showing the woman and the chimera was attached to the cover of his manuscript Noa Noa. There he described his interest in Tahitian faces and quoted Poe’s line that beauty contains an element of strangeness.

Show moreless

Provenance

Lambert collection;
Anonymous sale, Paris, Palais Galliera (Ader Picard Tajan), 7
June 1973, lot 5;
Private collection (Philippe Derazay?), Paris;
Anonymous sale, Paris, Piasa, 26 March 2003, lot 120;
Private Collection, UK.

Literature

Richard Brettell, et al., The Art of Paul Gauguin, exhibition catalogue, Washington,
National Gallery of Art and Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, 1988-1989, p.270, under no.148;
Victor Merlhès, ‘Le <<Cahier pour Aline>>: Histoire et signification’, in Paul Gauguin, “A ma fille Aline, ce cahier est dédié.”, facsimile ed., Bordeaux, 1989, illustrated p.36; Ronald Pickvance,
Paul Gauguin, exhibition catalogue, Martigny, Fondation Giannada, 1998, pp.234-235, no.78 and pp.279-280, no.78, illustrated p.133;
Elisabeth Vedrenne, ‘Gauguin, l’atelier des tropiques’, L’Oeil, July-August 1998, illustrated p.73;
Isabelle de Wavrin, ‘Un marché de pénurie’, Beaux-Arts Magazine: Gauguin-Tahiti, 2003, illustrated p.87;
Gauguin. Maker of Myth, exhibition catalogue, London, Tate, 2010, illustrated p. 168, no. 104;
Impressionists on Paper, exhibition catalogue, London, Royal Academy, 2023, illustrated p. 125, no. 60.