Description
Paul Gauguin – The Bathers – hand-painted oil painting reproduction
A year after the canvas was painted, Edgar Degas bought it. The picture dates from 1897, oil on canvas, 60.4 × 93.4 cm (height × width, so a horizontal format), and it is held today by the National Gallery of Art in Washington under accession number 1951.5.1. Here that riverbank is made again under the brush: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, oil on canvas, with no printing.
A painter who bought a painter
The route is recorded to the day. On 30 October 1898 the canvas passed through Gauguin’s friend Georges-Daniel de Monfreid to the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard, and in November of the same year Degas bought it. This was not a collector’s whim: Degas was buying Gauguin at a time when most of the Paris criticism had written him off. The picture stayed with him until his death.
A name the picture did not have
When Degas’s studio was dispersed at Galerie Georges Petit on 26 and 27 March 1918, this canvas went to the block as lot 47 and was entered in the catalogue simply as “Tahiti, paysage” – a Tahitian landscape. It did not carry the title The Bathers at that moment. From there it went by way of Jos Hessel and Vollard to New York and Adolph Lewisohn; his son Sam A. Lewisohn left it to the Washington gallery in 1951.
Flesh painted green
Five figures stand along the bank; one is upright beside the thick trunk at the right, the others sit or kneel by the water. The colouring of the skin is the surprise: the bodies are neither brown nor pink but greenish, out of the same palette as the foliage behind them, while the ground is a pink-orange. Holding the scene upright is a thin sapling that runs top to bottom across the middle and cuts the picture in two. In the lower right corner stand the signature P Gauguin and the year 97.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
The low, wide format means this picture sits well above a sofa, a chest of drawers or a bed, where there is more room across than up. We paint it in eight sizes; 92 × 60 cm is the nearest to the original, while for a larger wall 150 × 100 cm is a frequent choice. From the same year of 1897 comes Where Do We Come From? – the same Tahiti and the same long format, but three times wider; Three Tahitian Women follows two years later and sets its figures against colour rather than into a landscape, and Arearea shows the same flat handling of colour.
- Subject: The Bathers, Paul Gauguin, 1897, Tahiti
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas – never printed
- Original: oil on canvas, 93.4 × 60.4 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, acc. 1951.5.1
- Interesting fact: at the 1918 sale of Degas’s studio the picture went under the name “Tahiti, paysage”, not as The Bathers
