Paul Gauguin Drawings

Paul Gauguin Drawings: Introduction

Paul Gauguin's drawings do not form a neat queue of first thoughts waiting to become paintings. Some record a face, animal, plant or building; some test a pose or colour relation; some preserve material that returned years later; others are finished works in charcoal, pastel or wash. His late transfer drawings complicate the category further, because pressure carried a drawn line through ink to make a second, altered surface. Drawing was observation, storage, revision and invention—not a single preliminary stage.

At a Glance

• ArtistPaul Gauguin
• GuidePaul Gauguin Drawings
• FocusDrawings
• Key topicsSeveral books, used across several places; How to read a recto and verso; Notes, references and finished sheets; Motifs kept for later use
• OverviewPaul Gauguin's drawings do not form a neat queue of first thoughts waiting to become paintings.

Contents

1. Paul Gauguin Drawings: Introduction
2. Several books, used across several places
3. How to read a recto and verso
4. Notes, references and finished sheets
5. Motifs kept for later use
6. Oil-transfer drawings: line through pressure
7. Drawing as a changing archive

Drawings and Related Works

Vincent van Gogh Painting Sunflowers

Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)

Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven

That range is easiest to see when the object itself comes before the subject. A sketchbook leaf has two sides. A sheet may have been turned while it was used, removed from its binding after the artist's death, attached to another page by an owner, or hidden under a mount until a conservator separated it. What appears in a frame today may preserve Gauguin's marks while presenting them in an arrangement he never chose.

Several books, used across several places

Art Institute of Chicago research points to at least seven sketchbooks that Gauguin often used concurrently. Because many leaves were dispersed, the books cannot be reconstructed completely. The evidence nevertheless challenges the idea that one volume corresponds to one trip, place or project. ^[1]

The National Gallery of Art's Breton Sketchbook No. 16 makes the problem concrete. Its thirty-six pages were used between 1884 and 1888, across a period that took Gauguin through Paris, Brittany, Martinique, London and Arles. Breton is a collection title, not proof that every mark was made in Brittany. Nor should a page associated with Martinique automatically be read as a Caribbean document when the book travelled much farther. ^[2]

One leaf is catalogued as Head of a Man with a Study of His Back; Various Sketches with a Peasant Woman and a Goose [recto]. It is graphite and crayon on wove paper, measuring 16.9 by 22.5 centimetres, with the accession number 1991.217.56.a. The reverse carries studies of a grazing cow and several heads. These are two worked faces of one sheet, not two independent objects. ^[3]

The book therefore functioned less like a bound sequence intended for readers than a portable store of visual prompts. People, animals and fragments could accumulate without a narrative order. A later painting might draw on them, but that possibility does not make each line a preparatory design.

How to read a recto and verso

An Art Institute leaf of 1891–93 bears Sketches of Tahitian Residence with Color Notations and Dogs on the recto and studies of figures, a pandanus leaf and a vanilla plant on the verso. Fabricated black chalk is present on both sides, with watercolour on the verso and offset chalk on the recto. The sheet measures 313 by 201 millimetres and is numbered 1966.545R/V. ^[4]

Words for colours appear among the architectural and animal studies. They show Gauguin recording relations that a black drawing could not display, yet they do not amount to a complete recipe for a later picture. Sewing holes also helped researchers revise an older assumption about which face was the recto and how it sat in the book. Cataloguing here is not clerical labelling: physical evidence changes the reconstruction of how a page was handled. ^[4]

Another leaf has the formidable current title Sketches of Various Animals and Head (recto), Sketches of a Head, Figure in Profile, Anatomical Details, and Animals (verso). Made in 1891–93, it measures 320 by 217 millimetres. The recto is graphite; the verso combines graphite with pen and an ink now pale yellow but estimated to have been purple originally. Present colour can therefore be the outcome of material change rather than the colour Gauguin first saw. ^[5]

Its object history is equally instructive. A previous owner glued this sheet along one edge to a different double-sided leaf. Art Institute conservators later separated them after concluding that they had not originally formed the joined arrangement. Neither the old pairing nor the present separation should be mistaken for Gauguin's sequence. ^[5]

The same caution applies to Seated Tahitian Woman (recto), Sketches of Roosters and Chickens (verso), also dated 1891–93. Its recto uses fabricated black chalk, selective blending and touches of grey gouache; the bird studies on the reverse are graphite. An acidic secondary backing once concealed that verso until conservation treatment removed it in 1988. The birds are crossed out, but the catalogue cannot establish who made those cancellations. Their visibility, and the story viewers might build from them, depend partly on a modern intervention. ^[6]

Notes, references and finished sheets

These leaves show rapid notation and reuse, but drawing should not become shorthand for unfinished. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's A Tahitian Woman with a Flower in Her Hair of 1891–92 is a 39-by-30.2-centimetre sheet made with charcoal, pastel, red chalk and wash. Its layered media and sustained presentation give it an independent visual presence quite unlike a crowded sketchbook page. ^[7]

The descriptive title does not supply a name or biography for the represented woman. A drawing from colonial Polynesia is not transparent evidence of identity, age, consent, emotion or social relationship. It records Gauguin's selection and treatment of a subject, not unmediated access to that person's experience.

The privacy of drawings also needs qualification. The Art Institute quotes a 1903 remark in which Gauguin called them “my letters, my secrets”. ^[1] The phrase can illuminate his reluctance to expose some working material, but it cannot prove that every surviving sheet was private, spontaneous or confessional. Sketchbook pages circulated, were disbound and sold; other drawings were developed for dealers or made as independent works. One aphorism should not flatten those different histories.

Motifs kept for later use

Gauguin's drawings often acted as a reserve rather than the first rung of a fixed ladder. The Art Institute's Seated Female (related to the painting Sister of Charity) is a black-ink transfer drawing on ivory wove paper, about 141 by 219 millimetres, dated around 1902. Research links its principal figure directly to a pen-and-ink drawing from 1891–93. A related pose had already entered a painting in 1896 before appearing again in Sister of Charity in 1902. ^[8]

This long interval matters. The early sheet did not simply lead to one final canvas and then lose its function. A pose could be retrieved, traced, reversed or placed beside different figures. Transfer turned memory into a physical procedure: the earlier line remained a source, while the later surface became another object.

Such reuse also demands ethical attention. Gauguin could combine studies made from observation with reproductions, photographs and his own earlier inventions. The result may be formally complex while remaining a European construction made within French colonial conditions. Repetition does not authenticate a scene as a record of Polynesian life; it can instead reveal how a chosen image was detached from one setting and made to serve another.

Oil-transfer drawings: line through pressure

MoMA's Tahitian Woman with Evil Spirit, about 1900, shows the late process at large scale. The double-sided sheet measures 65 by 46 centimetres and is now in MoMA's collection as 860.2013.a-b. Its verso is graphite and coloured pencil; its recto is an oil-transfer drawing. ^[9]

MoMA attributes the invention of this hybrid method to Gauguin in Tahiti in 1899. In a March 1902 letter to Gustave Fayet, he described laying a clean sheet over paper rolled with printer's ink and drawing on the upper sheet. Pencil pressure carried ink onto its reverse, so hardness, point and paper affected the transferred line. On the MoMA work, he also applied an olive tone through a separate inked sheet and selective pressure. That added operation belongs to this object; it is not a universal formula for every transfer drawing. ^[10]

The verso drawing and recto transfer are materially connected but visually unequal. Contact can soften an edge, interrupt a contour, reverse relations or introduce incidental marks. About eighty-nine oil-transfer drawings dating from 1899 to 1903 had been documented in the scholarship cited by MoMA, ranging from study-like sheets to highly finished works. The MoMA example was among ten major transfers sent to Ambroise Vollard in 1900, evidence that this was not merely a private studio by-product. ^[10]

Its imagery also exposes the limits of the word observation. MoMA identifies sources in Gauguin's prior sculpture and in a photograph of a Tongan subject. Those elements were relocated and combined in an image labelled Tahitian. The drawing process is inventive, but the title and atmosphere should not erase the movement of a photographed Polynesian person into a European artist's constructed fiction. ^{[9] [10]}

Drawing as a changing archive

Gauguin's works on paper are best approached by asking what kind of object each one is. Was it bound or loose? Which side was drawn first? Has ink faded, a backing been removed, or two leaves been separated? Does a motif record immediate looking, retrieve an older study, or pass through contact and pressure into another surface?

Those questions replace the simple hunt for a painting's first draft with a richer account of practice. Sketchbooks stored discontinuous encounters. Finished sheets gave drawing its own scale and colour. Transfer works made repetition visible as material change. Across them all, the line could observe, remember and migrate—and the surviving paper carries both Gauguin's decisions and the later histories that changed how those decisions can now be seen.

Related Pages

• Paul Gauguin Prints and Woodcuts
• Still Life with Head-Shaped Vase and Japanese Woodcut
• Barbarous Tales
• Matamoe (Landscape with Peacocks)

Frequently Asked Questions

References

1. Art Institute of Chicago, “Cats. 29–38: Sketchbook Pages, 1891–93”, current scholarly catalogue overview: View source
2. National Gallery of Art, “Gauguin Drawings from the Armand Hammer Collection”, exhibition overview: View source
3. National Gallery of Art, “Head of a Man with a Study of His Back; Various Sketches with a Peasant Woman and a Goose [recto]”, 1884–88 group, 1991.217.56.a: View source
4. Art Institute of Chicago, “Sketches of Tahitian Residence with Color Notations and Dogs (recto), Sketches of Figures, Pandanus Leaf, and Vanilla Plant (verso)”, 1891/93, Cat. 31: View source
5. Art Institute of Chicago, “Sketches of Various Animals and Head (recto), Sketches of a Head, Figure in Profile, Anatomical Details, and Animals (verso)”, 1891/93, Cat. 34: View source
6. Art Institute of Chicago, “Seated Tahitian Woman (recto), Sketches of Roosters and Chickens (verso)”, 1891/93, Cat. 35: View source
7. Metropolitan Museum of Art, “A Tahitian Woman with a Flower in Her Hair”, 1891–92, 67.187.13: View source
8. Art Institute of Chicago, “Seated Female (related to the painting Sister of Charity)”, c. 1902, Cat. 125: View source
9. Museum of Modern Art, “Tahitian Woman with Evil Spirit”, c. 1900, 860.2013.a-b: View source
10. Lotte Johnson, Museum of Modern Art, “Metamorphoses: Paul Gauguin's Oil Transfer Drawings”, 2014: View source