純潔の喪失

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.