A Fisherman Drinking Beside His Canoe

Paul Gauguin · 1894

Medium

Wood-block print in black ink, with red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet and brown watercolor and touches of red and orange gouache, on ivory Japanese paper, laid down on cream Japanese paper

Original size

Image/primary/secondary support: 20.6 × 14 cm (8 1/8 × 5 9/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Post-Impressionism

This 1894 work captures the quiet intimacy of Polynesian life that Gauguin had witnessed during his first stay in Tahiti — a solitary fisherman pausing to drink beside his canoe, rendered in deep, saturated colour that feels both documentary and dreamlike. Gauguin had returned to France in 1893 after his first Tahitian period, and works from this interval carry a particular tension — memories still vivid, distance giving them new shape. The original is a woodblock print layered with watercolour and gouache, a technique Gauguin developed with deliberate roughness, rejecting the polished surfaces of academic printmaking in favour of something more direct and handmade. That physical quality — the grain, the uneven ink, the colour bleeding at edges — gives the image an almost totemic presence. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds the original, places it among a body of works that document Gauguin's sustained effort to synthesise Western printmaking tradition with the imagery and emotional register of the South Pacific — a project as much philosophical as aesthetic. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the warmth and tonal depth of the original onto canvas, preserving the stillness of the scene and the sense that Gauguin saw in even small, unremarkable moments something worth holding onto.