Portrait of the Painter Achille Granchi-Taylor

The man in this portrait was a painter too. Achille Granchi-Taylor, born in Lyon, was a friend from Gauguin's Paris years, and in 1885 both of them were still unknown and largely unsold. Gauguin had given up a stockbroker's salary only a few years earlier to paint full time, and money was short. A portrait of a fellow artist was the kind of picture painters made of one another for nothing, out of company rather than commission. He set Granchi-Taylor in a narrow range of dark, earthy tones, the face lifted out of the shadow, and signed the lower corner “p Gauguin 85”. Within a year the sitter would leave for Pont-Aven, the cheap Breton village where Gauguin also worked, and slowly make his name painting the hard lives of the local fishing families.