Clovis

Gauguin's portrait of his son Clovis — painted in the early 1880s when the family was still together and Gauguin was transitioning from stockbroker to committed artist — is among his most tender and direct early works. Clovis was born in 1879, and the child portraits Gauguin made of his five children during the 1880s are notable for their psychological attentiveness, quite unlike the decorative figure painting of his Breton and Tahitian periods. The portrait belongs to the domestic reality Gauguin was in the process of abandoning — a world of bourgeois family life he would systematically destroy in pursuit of his artistic vocation.

The child's face is rendered with close, careful observation — the soft forms of childhood treated with a delicacy of brushwork distinct from Gauguin's later more schematic figure painting. The palette is warm and restrained, dominated by ochres and pale browns. The handling shows direct Impressionist influence in its varied, broken touch.