Description
Paul Gauguin – In the Waves – hand-painted oil painting reproduction
A nude figure slips back-first into a wave, red hair falling across her shoulder, and the sea beneath her is green as glass. The work was painted in 1889 at Pont-Aven in Brittany, oil on canvas, 92.5 × 72.4 cm, and is held by the Cleveland Museum of Art under accession number 1978.63 (gift of Mr. and Mrs. William Powell Jones). Here the wave takes its colour under the brush: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, oil on canvas, with no printing. The museum records the measurement as height by width.
This is not Tahiti, it is Brittany
The painting is often read as a tropical scene, but it was made two years before Gauguin first left for Tahiti, on the Breton coast. The bather is a Breton woman, the water is the Atlantic, and that is precisely the point: Gauguin assembled the motif we know from the South Seas at home first, in the cold. The work also carries a second title, L’Ondine (Bretagne) – an ondine is a water spirit of European folklore, not a Polynesian deity.
The colour is invented, not observed
The sea is not blue. Gauguin painted it green and set that green directly against orange hair, so that the two colours run at each other. The museum record describes lines and colours that seem invented rather than observed from life: the contour is simplified, there is almost no shadow, and the body is a plane between two poles of colour. The painting therefore does not show what the sea looks like, but what the viewer is meant to feel.
Café Volpini, 1889
In the same year Gauguin exhibited the work at the Café Volpini in Paris, in the show he mounted himself with his circle alongside the World’s Fair. It was that appearance which established him at the head of Symbolist painting. A second, less finished version of the same motif also exists; the Cleveland picture is the one we reproduce.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
The photographs above the text show this motif exactly as we painted it. We paint it in eight sizes; 72 × 92 cm is exactly the measurement of the original, while for a larger wall 100 × 130 cm is a frequent choice. The green and the orange are strong, so the painting carries a bright room and an empty wall. From the same Breton years come Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven, where the figures are clothed and the scene is public, and The Yellow Christ; the Breton coast in a religious scene is in The Green Christ.
- Subject: In the Waves (Dans les vagues), Paul Gauguin, 1889
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas – never printed
- Original: 92 × 72 cm, Cleveland Museum of Art, acc. 1978.63, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Powell Jones
- Interesting fact: the scene is not Tahitian – it was painted in Brittany, two years before Gauguin first sailed for Tahiti
