art-Gauguin.com
Paul Gauguin 1848-1903
Paul Gauguin - Portrait of a mother 1894
 Portrait of a mother |
From Städtische Galerie, Stuttgart:
Gauguin's mother, a beautiful half-Peruvian woman, had died almost twenty-five years earlier. The artist based her youthful likeness on an old photograph. The firmness of the direct gaze, the decoratively flat composition and the luminous yellow of the ground infuse the painting with the aura of an icon or a private devotional image. The formal similarities with the artist's Tahitian pictures show how Gauguin projected his search for primordial myths of womanhood and fertility into his art.