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    Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
    Tahitian Faces (Frontal View and Profiles), ca. 1899
    Charcoal on laid paper; 16 1/8 x 12 1/4 in. (41.0 x 31.1 cm)
    The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Annenberg Foundation Gift, 1996 (1996.418)

    Curator Comment

    Gauguin's appreciation for the Maori people, whom he believed innocent of modern civilization's woes, is stirringly conveyed in this New World icon. At the center is the face of a dark-haired young woman Gauguin portrayed during his second stay in Tahiti. With blank eyes and closed lips, her visage seems as timeless and remote as those carved by ancient sculptors. This subject appears to have been the model for one of the serenely voluptuous bearers of fruits and flowers in the Museum's painting Two Tahitian Women of 1899.

    Colta Ives, curator, Department of Drawings and Prints

    Provenance

    Ambrose Vollard, Paris; Daniel de Montfried, Paris; [Galerie Beyeler, Basel]; private collection, from 1960; sale, Sotheby's, London, December 3, 1991, lot 19; private collection; sale, Sotheby's, New York, November 8, 1994, lot 13; sale, Sotheby's, New York, November 12, 1996, lot 7.

    Bibliography

    Richard Brettell et al., The Art of Paul Gauguin (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988), p. 425; Colta Ives, "Tahitians," Recent Acquisitions: A Selection, 1996–1997. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 55, no. 2 (Fall 1997): cover and p. 58; Colta Ives and Susan Alyson Stein, The Lure of the Exotic: Gauguin in New York Collections (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002), p. 130.

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