La bella Angèle

Gauguin painted this in 1889 in Pont-Aven, the Breton village where he spent the years just before he sailed for Tahiti. The sitter was Angelique Satre, a local innkeeper known around town as the beautiful Angele. Gauguin was deep in Japanese prints then, and he did something odd with her portrait. He sealed the figure inside a painted circle, like a medallion, and set it against a flat decorative background with a small Peruvian idol off to one side. Madame Satre took one look and refused it, calling it horrible. Degas, who admired Gauguin, bought the picture two years later, and it stayed in his own collection for the rest of his life.