Mette addormentata su un divano

In 1875 the man who painted this had a steady job at a Paris stockbroking firm and a Danish wife two years into their marriage. Paul Gauguin painted on Sundays, an amateur who spent his spare income collecting the Impressionists, and the woman asleep here is that wife, Mette-Sophie Gad, stretched along a sofa in their apartment in a loose white dress. Nothing about it announces the artist who would later abandon this whole comfortable life for Brittany and then the South Pacific. The brushwork is careful, almost shy, more interested in the fall of light on cloth than in making any statement. He was 27, the marriage was young, and their first son had been born the year before.