Poor Fisherman

The title was already famous in Paris. Puvis de Chavannes had shown his Poor Fisherman at the Salon of 1881, a gaunt man standing in a boat with his head bowed, and while critics went after the flat drawing the younger painters kept writing about it. The French State bought it in 1887 for the Musée du Luxembourg, the first Puvis it had ever bought. 15 years later Gauguin was living at Punaauia on Tahiti, short of money and often ill, and he took the subject up again: a Tahitian man beside a canoe, drinking from a gourd under a heavy sky. The pose appears to come from a photograph he owned of an Egyptian relief at Abydos. In December 1896 he listed the canvas among nine he was shipping to the dealer Ambroise Vollard in Paris.