Vase in the Form of a Tropical Plant with Bird and Deity
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
1887–88
- Medium
- Stoneware painted with slip and gold
- Classification
- Sculpture
- Dimensions
- 21.5 × 17 × 12 cm (8 1/2 × 6 1/2 × 4 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Through prior purchase of the Estate of Suzette Morton Davidson, Major Acquisitions Centennial Endowment, Dellora A. Norris Funds
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
In I886 Paul Gauguin was invited to design artistic pottery with the well-known ceramist Ernest Chaplet. Rather than simply decorating premade vessels, Gauguin chose to model his own unconventional forms by hand, jokingly calling them his “monstrosities.” Here the wide lip and distinctive shoulder of the vase echo the shape of the tall plant on its surface, while the protruding leaves on its sides suggest handles yet have no utilitarian function. Gauguin decorated this vase with a mix of motifs, including a goose drawn from the artist’s paintings of Brittany and a Cambodian deity copied from a photograph of a sculpture near Angkor Wat.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
