{"id":83704,"date":"2021-09-02T18:04:38","date_gmt":"2021-09-02T16:04:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svetslik.si\/uncategorized\/the-bathing-place-la-baignade\/"},"modified":"2026-08-15T21:53:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T19:53:40","slug":"the-bathing-place-la-baignade","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/svetslik.si\/en\/paul-gauguin\/the-bathing-place-la-baignade\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Gauguin \u2013 The Bathing Place (La Baignade)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Paul Gauguin \u2013 The Bathing Place (La Baignade) \u2013 hand-painted oil painting reproduction<\/h2>\n

There is real gold on this sheet. The work was made in 1889<\/strong> and it is not an oil: the catalogue of the exhibition Paul Gauguin: Paris, 1889<\/em> lists it as gouache, watercolour, pastel and gold paint on green wove paper mounted on panel<\/strong>, 34.5 \u00d7 45 cm<\/strong> (height \u00d7 width, a horizontal format). The original is in a private collection<\/strong>. Here that bathing scene is made again under the brush: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction<\/strong>, oil on canvas, with no printing.<\/p>\n

Gold in the hair, not on the frame<\/h3>\n

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<\/strong>: under light it behaves unlike anything around it, because it is not a pigment but a metal. Gold was not a painter\u2019s ornament in those years; it belonged to church images and to the crafts \u2013 and Gauguin brought it into a scene of girls at the water.<\/p>\n

The green paper does half the work<\/h3>\n

The support is not white. The sheet is green<\/strong>, 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<\/strong> and folded blue-and-red clothing \u2013 the only sign that the girls have just undressed.<\/p>\n

What that means for a reproduction<\/h3>\n

Said plainly: the original is a work on paper and our version is oil on canvas<\/strong>. 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 \u2013 the proportions, the cold greens, the orange accent \u2013 carries across exactly.<\/p>\n

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

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 \u00d7 35 cm<\/strong> is the nearest to the original, while for a larger wall 100 \u00d7 80 cm is a frequent choice. From the same year of 1889 comes Breton Eve<\/a> \u2013 the only other picture on this shelf whose original is likewise not an oil but a sheet of paper; The Green Christ<\/a> belongs to the same Breton summer, and Young Christian Girl<\/a> shows the same country five years later.<\/p>\n