Description
Te Faaturuma – the first Gauguin in an American museum
A woman sits on the floor with her legs crossed, in a sleeveless white shift, resting her chin on her right hand. Her eyes are lowered. The floor is orange and takes up most of the canvas. At the lower left a straw hat with a red band lies on the ground; to the right stand two dark vessels and a green fruit. Behind her a band of pale green opens up, with a man riding across it, and a black dog sits at its edge. To the right rises a dark pierced screen with light cut-out shapes. The work is held by the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts under inventory number 1921.186; it was painted in 1891.
Gauguin’s first work in an American museum
The museum record carries a fact that is about more than the picture: when the Worcester Art Museum bought it in 1921, it was the first work by Gauguin to enter an American museum. The canvas is therefore not only an early Tahitian painting but also the point at which this painter first appeared in a public collection on the other side of the Atlantic.
Before that it belonged to Edgar Degas
The record names the earlier owner as well. The canvas was owned by the painter Edgar Degas. The museum adds that the pose, with the chin resting on one hand, is often associated with Degas himself. How the painting reached private hands is set out in the list of owners: at the painter’s own sale in Paris in 1895 the canvas went unsold, and only afterwards did it change owner.
What is seen through the opening
At the back a pale band of green opens, working like a second and much lighter painting inside the first. A small figure rides across it, and a dog sits on the threshold looking the same way. That band is the only part of the canvas where the space has depth; everything else is arranged on the surface and brought right up close to the viewer.
Saturated colours that are not natural
The museum describes the colours of this canvas as highly saturated and unnatural. The orange of the floor is not the observed colour of a floor but a decision, and the same is true of the green outside and of the white of the shift. It is precisely this distance between the observed and the painted that gives the work a quiet tension a photograph does not have.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every painting here is made by hand in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. In this motif the orange floor is the hardest part: it is large and even, but it must not become a flatly brushed area or it loses its warmth. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished work for approval. Nothing on these pages is printed; the colour is mixed and laid on again for each canvas.
- Subject: a woman seated on an orange floor, with a rider and a dog behind her.
- Technique: oil on canvas, saturated orange and green.
- Sizes: portrait format, from 30 x 40 cm to 150 x 200 cm; 60 x 80 cm and 75 x 100 cm are often chosen.
- Of note: with the purchase of 1921 the first Gauguin in an American museum.
From the same Tahitian year, see also Faaturuma (Melancholic), Mata Mua (In Olden Times) and Two Tahitian Women. The museum record gives the measurement as height by width: 91.1 x 68.7 cm.
