La belle Angèle

La Belle Angèle is an oil on canvas portrait painted by Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven in Brittany in 1889; measuring 92 × 73.2 cm, it is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, given by the dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1927.

The sitter is Marie-Angélique Satre (1868–1932), known as 'la belle Angèle', who with her husband kept one of the inns of Pont-Aven and was considered one of the most beautiful women in the area. Around 1920 she recalled how the picture came about: Gauguin, gentle and very poor, kept telling her husband that he wanted to paint her, and eventually began. When he showed her the result she called it a horror and told him to take it away; disappointed, he replied that he had never made such a successful portrait.

Her reaction is understandable, for Gauguin had resolved to dare everything. Borrowing a device from Japanese prints, and specifically from Hokusai, he enclosed the half-length figure in a circle set against a largely decorative blue ground scattered with flowers, abandoning conventional perspective and the unity of space. The forms are outlined with darker contours in the cloisonnist manner. Angèle's stiff pose, her Breton festival costume and the capital letters LA BELLE ANGELE give the image a ceremonial character, while at the left an anthropomorphic pot in a Peruvian style, which the Orsay describes as an exotic version of a Breton idol, adds a symbolic note.

Rejected by its sitter, the painting was handled by the Boussod-Valadon gallery from 1889 and was included in Gauguin's sale at the Hôtel Drouot on 22 February 1891. Edgar Degas, who considered it a masterpiece, bought it that year, and it stayed in his collection until the sale at the Galerie Georges Petit in March 1918, after which Vollard acquired it. The canvas is inscribed 'LA BELLE ANGELE' and signed and dated 'P. Gauguin 89' at lower left.