La Perte du pucelage

Gauguin painted this in Paris over the winter of 1890 into 1891, in the months before he sailed for Tahiti for the first time. His model was Juliette Huet, a young seamstress who was carrying his child by the time he left France. He lays her out stiff and pale like a carved tomb figure, a cut flower in one hand and a small fox pressed to her side, an animal he called a symbol of perversity. Behind her a Breton wedding party files across the fields. He finished the picture just before he auctioned off a stack of his own paintings to raise the fare, and sailed for the South Pacific in the spring of 1891.