Self-Portrait

This Self Portrait is an oil-on-canvas painting by Paul Gauguin, dated about 1893 and now in the Detroit Institute of Arts, which received it in 1969 as a gift of Robert H. Tannahill. The canvas is small, 46.2 by 38.1 cm, and is initialled P.G. at lower left.

Gauguin painted it during his return to Paris from Tahiti. He had decided to leave the island by the end of July 1893 and spent the next two years in France, staging an exhibition of his Tahitian work at Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery in November 1893, before sailing back to the Pacific in June 1895, never to see Europe again. In this picture, according to the Detroit museum, he casts himself as an outsider, wearing the long hair and clothing of a Breton peasant rather than a Parisian suit.

He shows himself bust-length in three-quarter view, chin resting on his right hand and eyes turned towards the viewer. He wears a grey-green coat over an orange and green striped shirt with a red-orange cravat. The background is split horizontally: a bright yellow band runs beneath a dull blue wall, which the museum reads as a division between a spiritual, intellectual realm and a physical, material one. At upper right hangs a reproduction of a sketch by Eugène Delacroix showing Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise. Gauguin's hand points towards it, a gesture the museum interprets as sympathy with the exiled couple, since he too had been, for the time being, cast out of the paradise he had found in Tahiti.

The painting's recorded history runs through the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume and Brendon Davis in London to Sir Michael Sadler of Oxford, who bought it in 1911 and owned it until at least 1936. By 1946 it belonged to Mr and Mrs L. B. Wescott in New Jersey; in 1955 it passed through the Thannhauser gallery in New York to the Detroit collector Robert H. Tannahill, who gave it to the museum.