Description
The Boss’s Daughter – the evidence is the wallpaper, not the face
The young woman is painted to the chest, turned slightly to the left, looking past the viewer. Her hair is short and chestnut, her face pale, her lips red. She wears a dark brown jacket with white lace showing beneath it, and round her neck a bright red scarf is loosely knotted – the strongest colour on the canvas. The ground is green and painted with stylised flowers and pale buds. To the left of the face the signature P. Gauguin with the year 86 is visible. The work is held by the Maurice Denis departmental museum under number PMD 984.10.1; it was made in 1886.
What the museum infers from the background
The museum’s text reasons not from the face but from the wall behind it. The wallpaper with its stylised flowers is found in other paintings of the same year, which according to the museum’s record could mean that the young woman sat in Gauguin’s own apartment. Who she was, the museum says, remains uncertain; the title speaks of a daughter, but the identity is not confirmed. The background is thus the only part of the picture that says anything checkable about her.
The red scarf holds the canvas together
The museum notes that the painter still uses the short parallel strokes of the impressionists here, but already handles colour with a new boldness: the red scarf blazes at the centre of the composition and gives the picture both its brilliance and its balance. Quieten that red and the green ground and brown jacket settle into a single dark area.
Exhibited as Portrait
The same record reports that at the eighth exhibition of the impressionists the work was listed under the single title Portrait, and that it later belonged to the art dealer Ambroise Vollard. The museum acquired it with the financial participation of the FRAM fund for the Ile-de-France region.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every reproduction here is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. In this motif it is decisive that the wallpaper stay soft and undefined: as soon as the drawing on the wall goes sharp it takes over the scene and the face steps back. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished work for approval.
- Subject: the portrait of a young woman with a red scarf before a flowered wallpaper.
- Technique: oil on canvas, a red area at the centre of a green ground.
- Sizes: portrait format, from 42 x 50 cm to 164 x 200 cm; 75 x 90 cm and 90 x 110 cm are often chosen.
- Of note: the museum infers where it was painted from the pattern on the wallpaper.
If the same period interests you, see also Interior from the Artist’s Home, rue Carcel, The Market Gardens of Vaugirard and Schuffenecker’s Studio. The museum record gives the measurement as height by width: 55.3 x 46 cm.
