Attributed to Paul Gauguin
France · Post-impressionism
The story
The Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris catalogues a painting as attributed to Paul Gauguin, a label that marks the attribution as uncertain. It is a dense tropical landscape dated 1901, the year Gauguin left Tahiti for the Marquesas Islands, where he died two years later. Through heavy green vegetation walk three children and a man in black who looks like a missionary priest, with a white house half hidden behind the trees. The picture was once called The Priest and the Children.
Georges Wildenstein included it in his 1964 catalogue of Gauguin's paintings, and its chain of owners is well recorded. It passed through the Austrian painter Hans Böhler, the Amsterdam dealers Huinck and Scherjon and the Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg before the collector Domenica Walter bought it. The Louvre acquired it from her in 1963, and it moved to the Orangerie in 1977.
