Ève bretonne (I)

In the summer of 1889 Paris was crowded for the World's Fair, the one the brand-new Eiffel Tower had been built for. Gauguin and his circle of younger painters had no place in the official art shows, so they hung their pictures on the walls of a cafe run by a man named Volpini, right on the fairground. This Eve was among the works he was thinking through that season. She is no garden Eve. Gauguin borrowed her hunched, knees-drawn pose from a Peruvian mummy he had studied in a Paris museum, and gave her the plain features of the Breton peasant women he had been living among. Worked in watercolour and pastel rather than oil, she is small and pale, one of the mournful, folded figures he would keep returning to for the rest of his life.