Interpretive Resource

Before Paul Gauguin left behind a banking career to devote himself to art, he assembled a small but choice collection of contemporary French paintings. It included several canvases by Paul Cézanne, whose work Gauguin greatly admired. The regard was not reciprocal; distrustful of Gauguin, Cézanne referred disparagingly to his "Chinese images" and accused him of trying to steal his "little sensation".

In the Art Institute’s "portrait" (the sitter is unidentified), Gauguin explored the mystery of the older artist’s technique. Compote, Glass, and Apples (1879/80; New York, private collection)—Gauguin’s favorite among the Cézannes he owned—appears in the background. In copying this still life, Gauguin tried to duplicate the "constructive" handling that Cézanne had adopted around 1880 as a way of disciplining unruly Impressionist sketchiness; he also used a variant of this stroke for parts of the model’s blouse, dress, and hands. The compacted juxtaposition of figure and still life recall Cézanne’s unorthodox compositional strategies. X-rays reveal that the woman’s hands were originally clasped, as is the case in a number of roughly contemporary portraits by Cézanne of his wife, which also seem to have provided Gauguin with a precedent for the female figure’s monumentality and psychological opacity.

Significantly, at around the same time he created this homage to Cézanne, Gauguin executed a copy (1891; private collection) of Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863; Paris, Musée d’Orsay). Contemplating his future at a transitional moment in his career—he made his first journey to Tahiti in June 1891—Gauguin reassessed his position with regard to an older generation of artists. Portrait of a Woman in Front of a Still Life by Cézanne is thus a work of great interest, offering a unique glimpse of one great painter grappling with the achievement of another.