Seated Tahitian Woman (recto), Sketches of Roosters and Chickens (verso)

Paul Gauguin · 1891/93

Medium

Black fabricated chalk, selectively blended, with touches of brush and gray gouache, over traces of black fabricated chalk offset (recto); graphite (verso); on ivory wove paper (removed from a sketchbook)

Original size

17.8 × 27.3 cm (7 1/16 × 10 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Post-Impressionism

This double-sided drawing captures Gauguin at his most immediate — a seated Tahitian woman rendered in bold, selectively blended chalk on one side, casual sketches of roosters and chickens on the other. Gauguin arrived in Tahiti in 1891 with his sketchbooks full of European assumptions, and left with something altogether different. These drawings date from that first transformative stay, when direct observation fed the mythologised figures of his major canvases. The combination of black fabricated chalk and gray gouache gives the seated figure a sculptural solidity unusual for works on paper, while the rooster sketches on the reverse speak to the casual, continuous nature of his looking. Gauguin's 1891 voyage was partly funded by a French government arts mission — one of the more ironic footnotes in art history, given how thoroughly his Tahitian work would go on to challenge the culture that sponsored him. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the drawing's tonal depth and quiet authority into the warmer medium of oil on canvas, preserving the intimacy of a figure caught in an unguarded moment and bringing the full weight of Gauguin's Tahitian vision into a form made to last.