Mlle S. Manthey

By 1884 Paul Gauguin had been painting full time for about two years, and the household money was nearly gone. Late that year he moved to Copenhagen, the home city of his Danish wife, and took a job there as a sales agent for a French tarpaulin firm, painting whenever the work let him. This portrait comes from those Danish months. Its sitter, Sophie Margrethe Manthey, is a young woman in a hat, set down in the quick, bright brushwork Gauguin had learned from the Impressionists, with none of the flat colour and dark outlines of the pictures that later made his name. He was selling almost nothing, neither the tarpaulins nor the paintings, in a city where he barely spoke the language.