O rio branco

In the summer of 1888 Gauguin was at Pont-Aven in Brittany, broke, years before Tahiti, working out the flat bright manner that would make his name. He painted this riverbank on the Aven in June. That autumn, short of money or of canvas in the small town, he turned the same stretcher over and painted a portrait of Madeleine Bernard, the sister of his friend, on the back. So the two pictures share one piece of cloth, a landscape on one face and a young woman on the other. The museum in Grenoble bought it in 1923. In 1978 it was stolen on the way back from an exhibition and turned up a year later, damaged, but recovered.