Paul Gauguin – Breton Boy

Paul Gauguin – Breton Boy – hand-painted oil painting reproduction

The museum and the conservators do not agree about this canvas to the millimetre. It was painted in 1889, oil on canvas, 73.5 × 93 cm by the museum record (width × height, so an upright format), and it is held by the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne. Here that lying boy is made again under the brush: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, oil on canvas, with no printing. The work carries accession number WRM 3114.

Seven millimetres the sources disagree about

The museum record gives the width as 73.5 cm. The technical study Painting Light (Milan, 2008), which examined the canvas with infrared reflectography among other methods, gives 74.2 cm. Seven millimetres, and they do not come from nowhere: that is how the numbers move when a canvas is measured afresh, in or out of its stretcher. Curiously, the proportions of our photograph match 74.2 exactly. That says something about the photograph, not about the canvas, so we follow the museum record: 73.5 stands, and we print the other figure rather than bury it.

The year written before the signature

The boy lies on a white cloth spread over grass, one arm across his chest, his head turned towards us and his eyes half closed. The grass is an even green, scattered with small leafy sprigs. In the lower right corner the name does not come first: the year 89 stands ahead of P Gauguin. The reversed order is a small thing, but it is checkable – it is visible on the picture itself.

A white cloth instead of a background

In the Breton year of 1889 Gauguin repeatedly set a bare body straight into the grass. Here he pushed one more thing between the body and the ground: a spread white cloth that works as a light plane and throws the green back off itself. It is because of that white that the skin does not sink into the greenery but stays warm. There is no background in the usual sense – no sky, no horizon, only grass rising to the top edge.

A hand-painted reproduction for your home

The upright format and the quiet green plane mean this picture works where a wall is taller than it is wide – beside a door, between two windows, in a narrow hall. We paint it in eight sizes; 73 × 93 cm is the nearest to the original, while for a larger wall 100 × 130 cm is a frequent choice. From the same year of 1889 comes Breton Eve – a bare body in Brittany again, but on paper instead of canvas; The Bathing Place puts bathers into the water of the same summer, and The Green Christ shows the same country in a religious subject.

• Subject: Breton Boy, Paul Gauguin, 1889, Brittany
• Technique: hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas – never printed
• Original: oil on canvas, 73.5 × 93 cm by the museum (74.2 × 93 cm in a 2008 technical study), Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne
• Interesting fact: in the lower right corner the year is written before the name – 89 first, then P Gauguin