Woman Strolling
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
c. 1880
- Medium
- Tropical laurel (Terminalia), stained red and black
- Classification
- Sculpture
- Dimensions
- H.: 25 cm (9 3/4 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Through prior bequest of Joseph Winterbotham
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
When Paul Gauguin first exhibited this doll-like figurine at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881, critics disparaged what they considered its simplistic coloring and crudely whittled surface. The avant-garde set, however, celebrated its stylized form. Gauguin’s younger colleague Georges Seurat, who may have seen the sculpture at the exhibition and in Gauguin’s studio, presented similarly pared-down, columnar figures in A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 only a few years later.
Gauguin came to painting through sculpture and preferred to work with wood, an unusual artistic medium at the time in part because of its humble nature. He sought to expand the Impressionists’ narrow definition of fine art to include objects—like this sculpture—that might be dismissed as decoration or craft.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
