Still Life with a Profile of Mimi

From the autumn of 1889 the one inn in the Breton fishing hamlet of Le Pouldu had two painters living in it, de Haan and Gauguin, whose pupil he had become. Their landlady was Marie Henry, and she had a small daughter, Marie-Lea, called Mimi. Mimi is the profile in this picture, at the edge of the table, old enough by then to sit there and stare at the apples the painter needed to keep exactly where they were. The rest is flat, saturated colour of the kind Gauguin was working in under the same roof that winter. The Van Gogh Museum bought the still life in 2005.