La figlia del padrone

Gauguin painted this in 1886, the year the Impressionists held their eighth and last group show in Paris, with several of his pictures on the wall. That same year, short of money after leaving his job on the stock exchange, he spent his first long summer at Pont-Aven in Brittany, lodging cheaply at a boarding house. The sitter is said to be the daughter of the house, a plain-faced young woman set against green flowered wallpaper. He was still laying paint in the short Impressionist strokes he had learned, but the colour is already his own, a red scarf flaring at her throat and holding the whole picture together. Who she actually was has never been pinned down.