Étude de nu

This is early Gauguin, painted in Paris in 1880, years before Tahiti and the bright flat colours he is famous for. At this point he was still a stockbroker who painted on the side, and here he shows a seamstress named Suzanne sitting on an unmade bed, mending cloth, with a mandolin hanging on the wall behind her. He painted her body plainly, an ordinary woman with the marks of a real body, not the smooth ideal nude the Salon expected. When he showed it at the Impressionist exhibition of 1881, the critic Joris-Karl Huysmans singled it out and called it vehemently realistic, high praise from a writer who was tired of prettified nudes. Success on the wall did not help him sell it. His wife Mette refused to hang it at home, and when Gauguin later abandoned the family she held on to it until it was sold in 1892 to a Danish painter. It is now in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.