Description
Paul Gauguin – Breton Eve (Ève Bretonne I) – hand-painted oil painting reproduction
It is not an oil and it is not large. This Eve is a sheet of paper: watercolour and pastel, 33.7 × 31.1 cm (height × width, so an upright format), made in 1889 during the Breton months, and held today by the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, under inventory number 1950.45. Here the sheet is given canvas and oil paint: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, made to order, never printed.
The hands cover the ears, not the eyes
A pale nude figure sits on a blue slope and presses her palms against her head – over the ears, not over the eyes. Her mouth is open and a blue band runs through her hair. Behind her a dark trunk rises with blue foliage and red fruit, and a serpent comes down along the branch on the right. The French record of the sheet says that Eve is stopping her ears so as not to hear the hissing; that is a reading rather than the painter’s own caption, and we give it as such. The gesture itself is unambiguous: what she shuts off is exactly the sense by which the temptation reaches her.
A pose Gauguin found in a museum
The closed posture with the head held between the hands recurs across Gauguin’s work, and art historians derive it from a mummy he saw in the Musee d’ethnographie du Trocadero in Paris. Wayne Andersen put the connection in print in 1967 and Robert Rosenblum developed it in 1975. This is an art-historical attribution, not a statement by Gauguin, and we report it as such. If it holds, this Eve is built on a body that had been dead for centuries before it was given the name of the first woman.
Brittany instead of Eden
The Fall has been moved off the garden and onto a Breton hillside. The ground is divided into a yellow and an orange-red field, two dark trunks stand in the distance, and the blue band in the hair is all that survives of local dress. The year 1889 is written on the sheet itself, beside the signature “P Gauguin” in the lower right corner. The same months produced the Breton canvases Gauguin is best known for – except that here he reached for paper.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
Said plainly: the original is watercolour and pastel on paper, while our version is oil on canvas. We do not imitate the grain of paper by printing it; we chase it with a dry, held-back stroke of the brush. We paint the work in eight sizes; 31 × 34 cm is the closest to the original, while for a larger wall 70 × 80 cm is a frequent choice. From the same year of 1889 comes In the Waves – a nude figure again, but thrown into movement instead of into silence; The Green Christ shows the same Breton summer in a religious subject, and Breton Girls Dancing the same countryside with its people in costume.
- Subject: Breton Eve (Ève bretonne), Paul Gauguin, 1889, Brittany
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas – never printed
- Original: watercolour and pastel on paper, 33.7 × 31.1 cm, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, inv. 1950.45
- Interesting fact: Eve is not covering her eyes but her ears – she shuts the temptation out at the ear, not at the eye
