Description
Paul Gauguin – Cruel Tales (Exotic Saying) – hand-painted oil painting reproduction
Gauguin’s last year. The canvas was painted in 1902 in the Marquesas, oil on canvas, and is held by the Museum Folkwang in Essen under accession number G 54. The title is not our invention: Gauguin wrote CONTES BARBARES in capitals along the bottom edge of the picture itself. We paint the scene again by hand: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, oil on canvas, never a print. The museum gives the measurement as height by width: 131.5 × 90.5 cm.
What is on the canvas
Two figures sit in front: a younger one with dark hair and a blue cloth, legs crossed, and beside them a second with long red-orange hair and a wreath of white flowers, wrapped in pale cloth. Behind them at the far left crouches a third figure — a European in a blue robe, red-bearded and green-eyed, a finger at his lips. Pink blossoms hang upper right, white lilies open lower right, and the ground is violet, scattered with small flowers. The colour is dense and dark; this is no longer the bright Tahiti of the 1890s.
The third figure is not Gauguin
You will often read that the painter put himself into this canvas. He is not in it. Compare it with the Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ, which you will also find here: there he is a dark-haired man with a heavy moustache and no beard. The crouching figure here is a red-haired, bearded man with an entirely different face. Who he is, is a separate question — art history has a name for him, but we do not print it here because we do not have two independent sources for it. What can be said with confidence is the negative: this is not a Gauguin self-portrait.
Two paintings with one name
Two works by Gauguin carry the name Contes barbares and they are easy to confuse. Ours is the large Essen canvas of 1902. The other is much smaller and earlier — dated 1892, recorded at about 28 × 39 cm, and held by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. On the size of our canvas the sources disagree: the Wikimedia Commons record, which cites the Museum Folkwang collection, gives 90.5 × 131.5 cm, while Wikidata gives 109 × 150 cm for the same museum and the same accession number. We have not resolved that conflict; we print the first figure because the aspect ratio of our photograph comes within 1.5 per cent of it, against 7.2 per cent for the other.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
The dark violet, the dense green and that red mane make this picture strong and still at once; the upright format asks for a narrow, tall wall — between a door and a window, beside a staircase, above a slim chest of drawers. The original measures, on the record we follow, 90.5 × 131.5 cm; we paint it in eight sizes, which you choose in the selector above this text. From the same late years comes Nevermore, whose title is likewise written on the canvas, and from a few years earlier Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
- Subject: Contes barbares — Cruel Tales, Paul Gauguin, 1902, the Marquesas
- Technique: hand-painted canvas, oil on canvas, a reproduction — never a print
- Original: oil on canvas, Museum Folkwang, Essen, acc. no. G 54; size per Commons 90.5 × 131.5 cm, Wikidata gives 109 × 150 cm — the conflict is unresolved
- Detail worth knowing: the title CONTES BARBARES is painted along the bottom edge; a much smaller picture of the same name, dated 1892, is in Tel Aviv
