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Lot Essay
A letter from Sylvie Crussard of the Wildenstein Institute dated Paris, 3 March 2000 accompanies this watercolor, which will be included in the forthcoming Gauguin catalogue raisonné.
The figure of a crouching woman in the present watercolor is the model for the oil Otahi (Alone) of 1893 (coll. Musée d'Orsay, Paris). In both works the woman wears the same red pareu with a white floral pattern that appears in other Tahitian paintings from this period.
Charles Stuckey relates the crouching figure of Otahi to several other works by Gauguin, including Te faaturama (1891; coll. Worcester Art Museum) and Vahine no te miti (1892; coll. Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires). These works "attempt to answer the challenge that obsessed early French realists including Degas, for whom the careful observation of the back of a figure . . . could be potentially as revelatory of personality, status, and social history as a conventional frontal pose." The pose of this figure was probably inspired Degas' pastel Femme nue, à genoux (Lemoisne, no. 1008) (op. cit.).
The figure of a crouching woman in the present watercolor is the model for the oil Otahi (Alone) of 1893 (coll. Musée d'Orsay, Paris). In both works the woman wears the same red pareu with a white floral pattern that appears in other Tahitian paintings from this period.
Charles Stuckey relates the crouching figure of Otahi to several other works by Gauguin, including Te faaturama (1891; coll. Worcester Art Museum) and Vahine no te miti (1892; coll. Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires). These works "attempt to answer the challenge that obsessed early French realists including Degas, for whom the careful observation of the back of a figure . . . could be potentially as revelatory of personality, status, and social history as a conventional frontal pose." The pose of this figure was probably inspired Degas' pastel Femme nue, à genoux (Lemoisne, no. 1008) (op. cit.).