Bouquet

In 1884 Paul Gauguin was not yet the painter of Tahiti. Two years earlier the Paris stock market had crashed, his career as a broker had fallen apart, and he had decided to paint for a living instead, with a Danish wife and five children to feed. A dense bouquet like this one belongs to those uncertain years, when he was still working close to the Impressionists he admired and collected. The stranger part of the painting's life came later. By the 1930s it hung in the private collection of Otto Krebs, a German industrialist. After the Second World War his pictures were taken to the Soviet Union as war reparations and brought to the Hermitage in Leningrad, where they were kept out of sight for about 50 years. This bouquet was not shown in public until 1995, in an exhibition the museum pointedly called Hidden Treasures Revealed. So an early, tentative flower piece spent half a century as a secret in a store room, and only recently became something you can simply walk up to and look at.