Description
Paul Gauguin – The Bathing Place (La Baignade) – hand-painted oil painting reproduction
There is real gold on this sheet. The work was made in 1889 and it is not an oil: the catalogue of the exhibition Paul Gauguin: Paris, 1889 lists it as gouache, watercolour, pastel and gold paint on green wove paper mounted on panel, 34.5 × 45 cm (height × width, a horizontal format). The original is in a private collection. Here that bathing scene is made again under the brush: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, oil on canvas, with no printing.
Gold in the hair, not on the frame
The girl in the foreground is turned away from us, wringing out the orange covering from her hair. That covering is exactly where Gauguin laid the gold paint: under light it behaves unlike anything around it, because it is not a pigment but a metal. Gold was not a painter’s ornament in those years; it belonged to church images and to the crafts – and Gauguin brought it into a scene of girls at the water.
The green paper does half the work
The support is not white. The sheet is green, and over large stretches of the water Gauguin simply lets it show through; the green around the bodies is not painted, it is the paper itself. That is why the surface is matt and grainy and the pastel strokes stay separate instead of blending. A dark tree trunk cuts the scene on the right, a second bather floats at the upper left, and along the bottom edge lie a pair of wooden clogs and folded blue-and-red clothing – the only sign that the girls have just undressed.
What that means for a reproduction
Said plainly: the original is a work on paper and our version is oil on canvas. The green ground that shines out from under the colour in the original is replaced here by a thin underpainting, laid first, with the cold greens built on top of it. We paint the gold area as a colour, not as a metal, and we say so in advance rather than promise a shine that oil paint cannot give. Everything else – the proportions, the cold greens, the orange accent – carries across exactly.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
The cold green and the small horizontal format make this a picture for a near wall: a hallway, a bathroom, a place looked at from close up. We paint it in eight sizes; 45 × 35 cm is the nearest to the original, while for a larger wall 100 × 80 cm is a frequent choice. From the same year of 1889 comes Breton Eve – the only other picture on this shelf whose original is likewise not an oil but a sheet of paper; The Green Christ belongs to the same Breton summer, and Young Christian Girl shows the same country five years later.
- Subject: The Bathing Place (La Baignade), Paul Gauguin, 1889, Brittany
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas – never printed
- Original: gouache, watercolour, pastel and gold on green paper on panel, 34.5 × 45 cm, private collection
- Interesting fact: the gold on the girl’s head covering is real gold in the paint, not a yellow pigment
