Woman with a Parasol

Around 1889 the young Aristide Maillol met Paul Gauguin, and according to the Musée d'Orsay the encounter pushed him toward simplified forms and a path of his own. This large canvas followed about three years later. A young woman in a flowered pink dress stands on a beach in strict profile, one gloved hand holding down her straw hat against the wind, the other trailing a closed white parasol. Her head sits almost exactly on the line of the horizon. The sea behind her is laid out in flat bands of blue and green, and the wind lifts her pink sash into a long ribbon. Maillol was still a painter then, and he had also begun designing embroideries, sewn by women workers to his patterns. The national museum of modern art bought the picture in 1955.