Breton Eve

In 1889 Gauguin drew a Breton Eve in pastel, the first woman of the Bible set down among the rocks and fields of the far west of France. Sérusier, who painted alongside him in Brittany in those years, took up the same idea around 1890. His Eve sits naked on a grey boulder, her head bowed into her hand so that her face is hidden. The painting has a second title, Melancholy, and the French national database of museum collections describes her as a seated figure of sadness in a landscape. Around her the hillside is laid out in flat shapes, grey rock, green grass, clumps of pink and orange scrub, a dark stand of trees. A heavy yellow cloud fills the upper corner of the sky. The canvas stayed with Sérusier's widow and then in private hands until it entered the national collections in 1981.