Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (Eve)
Paul Gauguin · 1889/90
- Medium
- Gouache, over a white ground, on gray millboard
- Original size
- 17 × 13 cm (6 3/4 × 5 1/8 in.)
- Currently held
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
"Portrait of the Artist's Mother (Eve)" carries an unusual emotional weight — Gauguin titled this intimate portrait after the first woman of scripture, folding the personal and the mythic into a single figure. By 1889, Gauguin was pulling away from Impressionism and moving toward a flatter, more symbolic style — the kind of bold simplification he would later push to its limit in Tahiti. Working in gouache on gray millboard rather than oil on canvas, he built up this image with a deliberate, almost graphic quality, the ground lending a cool, muted tone that suits the reflective mood. The choice of medium gives the work a sketch-like intimacy that a formal portrait never could. Gauguin's mother, Aline Chazal, died in 1867 when the artist was just nineteen — meaning he painted this likeness more than twenty years after her death, likely from memory or a photograph. Rendered in hand-mixed oils by a skilled painter working from the original held at the Art Institute of Chicago, this reproduction preserves the subdued palette, the quiet dignity of the pose, and the tender tension between a mother's face and the name of Eve.
Hand-painted oil reproduction
Painted in real oil on stretched canvas by master copyists. Delivered unframed — ready to frame at home.
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In Gauguin's style.
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