Retrato de Madeleine Bernard

Gauguin painted this in the summer of 1888 at Pont-Aven, the Breton village where he had gathered a knot of younger artists around him. The sitter is Madeleine Bernard, 17 years old and the sister of the painter Émile Bernard, one of that circle. Gauguin was taken with her — an attraction she did not return — and he paints her cool and self-possessed, hand to her chin, in the flat colour and firm outlines he was then working out. Money was tight that summer. He could not find fresh canvas in the village, so he simply turned over a landscape he had painted a few weeks earlier and worked on the back of it. The museum in Grenoble bought the portrait in 1923.