About This Artwork

Paul Gauguin
French, 1848-1903

Human Sorrow, plate eleven from The Volpini Suite, 1889

Zincograph in reddish-brown ink on yellow wove paper
287 x 232 mm (image); 293 x 237 mm (plate); 499 x 650 mm (sheet)
Signed lower right, on stone, in image, in reverse: "P. Gauguin/ 89"
William McCallin McKee Memorial Endowment, 1943.1028

Kornfeld 11 A.b.; Guérin 5 first edition

Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories

Exhibition History

The Art Institute of Chicago, "Gauguin: Paintings, Drawings, Prints, Sculpture," February 12-March 29, 1959, p. 80, cat. 132.

Toronto, Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, "Vincent van Gogh and the Birth of Cloisonism," January 23-March 22, 1981, pp. 194-201, cat. 58e (ill.), cat. by Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov; traveled to the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Vogh, Amsterdam, April 9-June 14, 1981.

Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, "The Art of Paul Gauguin," 1988, p. 135, cat. 69 (ill.); only shown at The Art Institute of Chicago, September 17-December 11, 1988.

Publication History

Elizabeth Mongan, Eberhard W. Kornfeld, and Harold Joachim, Paul Gauguin: Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints (Bern, 1988), p. 36, cat. 11.

Anne Leonard, The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700-1900 (Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, 2011), fig. 17, p. 27-28.

Ownership History

Sold by Dr. H. Wallach, New York, to the Art Institute, 1943.