{"id":82332,"date":"2021-09-02T17:50:28","date_gmt":"2021-09-02T15:50:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svetslik.si\/uncategorized\/cruel-tales-exotic-saying\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T09:06:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T07:06:37","slug":"cruel-tales-exotic-saying","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/svetslik.si\/en\/paul-gauguin\/cruel-tales-exotic-saying\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Gauguin \u2013 Cruel Tales (Exotic Saying)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Paul Gauguin \u2013 Cruel Tales (Exotic Saying) \u2013 hand-painted oil painting reproduction<\/h2>\n

Gauguin’s last year. The canvas was painted in 1902<\/strong> in the Marquesas, oil on canvas, and is held by the Museum Folkwang<\/strong> in Essen under accession number G 54<\/strong>. The title is not our invention: Gauguin wrote CONTES BARBARES<\/em> in capitals along the bottom edge of the picture itself. We paint the scene again by hand: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction<\/strong>, oil on canvas, never a print. The museum gives the measurement as height by width: 131.5 \u00d7 90.5 cm.<\/p>\n

What is on the canvas<\/h3>\n

Two figures sit in front: a younger one with dark hair and a blue cloth, legs crossed, and beside them a second with long red-orange hair<\/strong> and a wreath of white flowers, wrapped in pale cloth. Behind them at the far left crouches a third figure<\/strong> \u2014 a European in a blue robe, red-bearded and green-eyed, a finger at his lips. Pink blossoms hang upper right, white lilies open lower right, and the ground is violet, scattered with small flowers. The colour is dense and dark; this is no longer the bright Tahiti of the 1890s.<\/p>\n

The third figure is not Gauguin<\/h3>\n

You will often read that the painter put himself into this canvas. He is not in it.<\/strong> Compare it with the Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ<\/a>, which you will also find here: there he is a dark-haired man with a heavy moustache and no beard. The crouching figure here is a red-haired, bearded man with an entirely different face. Who he is, is a separate question \u2014 art history has a name for him, but we do not print it here because we do not have two independent sources for it. What can be said with confidence is the negative: this is not a Gauguin self-portrait.<\/p>\n

Two paintings with one name<\/h3>\n

Two works by Gauguin carry the name Contes barbares<\/em> and they are easy to confuse. Ours is the large Essen canvas of 1902<\/strong>. The other is much smaller and earlier \u2014 dated 1892, recorded at about 28 \u00d7 39 cm<\/strong>, and held by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. On the size of our canvas the sources disagree: the Wikimedia Commons record, which cites the Museum Folkwang collection, gives 90.5 \u00d7 131.5 cm<\/strong>, while Wikidata gives 109 \u00d7 150 cm for the same museum and the same accession number. We have not resolved that conflict<\/strong>; we print the first figure because the aspect ratio of our photograph comes within 1.5 per cent of it, against 7.2 per cent for the other.<\/p>\n

A hand-painted reproduction for your home<\/h3>\n

The dark violet, the dense green and that red mane make this picture strong and still at once; the upright format asks for a narrow, tall wall \u2014 between a door and a window, beside a staircase, above a slim chest of drawers. The original measures, on the record we follow, 90.5 \u00d7 131.5 cm<\/strong>; we paint it in eight sizes, which you choose in the selector above this text. From the same late years comes Nevermore<\/a>, whose title is likewise written on the canvas, and from a few years earlier Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?<\/a><\/p>\n