Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ

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Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ: Paul Gauguin

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Paul Gauguin Oil Painting - Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ

Keywords: Portrait, Artist, Yellow, Christ

Work Overview: Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ
Paul Gauguin
Oil on canvas
H. 30; W. 46 cm
Musée Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye

Painted on the eve of Gauguin's first trip to Tahiti, Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ is a veritable manifesto. In fact it is a triple portrait, in which the artist reveals different facets of his personality. Little known at the time, misunderstood, and abandoned by his wife who had gone back to Denmark with their children, Gauguin was having trouble obtaining an official mission to settle in the colonies.

In the central figure, Gauguin's piercing stare expresses the burden of these problems as well as his determination to struggle on with his art. In the background, he has brushed in two other works he had painted the previous year, which confront one another from an aesthetic and symbolic point of view.

On the left is The Yellow Christ, the image of sublimated suffering, which he painted in his own likeness. But Christ's arm stretched above the painter's head also suggests a protective gesture. The yellow of this painting, the artist's fetishistic colour, contrasts with the red of the Pot in the form of a Grotesque Head standing on a shelf on the right. This anthropomorphic pot, which Gauguin himself described as a "head of Gauguin the savage", bears the traces of the great heat that petrified the material. With its grimacing mask and primitive modelling, it incarnates Gauguin's sufferings and wildness of his personality.

Midway between the angel and the beast, between Synthetism and Primitivism, Gauguin anticipates the importance and gravity of the great human and artistic adventure he is preparing to experience.

Things sacred are present in the background of Gauguin's portraits, which he wanted to put in expressive harmony with the faces, according to the Symbolist doctrine which inspired also Van Gogh. In 1889, he placed The Yellow Christ in the background of his self-portrait.

In the history of European portraiture, since the days of the Renaissance, the sitter was often painted with their personal possessions, and particular care was taken with gestures and facial expressions to denote the subject’s personality. In the tradition of self-portraiture, an artist posed himself surrounded by his work.

As seen here, Gauguin has provided an innovative new take on the art of self-portraiture. He has placed himself in front of two works of great personal significance. One of these is a glazed stoneware pot which is a self-portrait from early 1889.1 Gauguin considered the ceramic to be ‘one of my best things’, and intended it as a gift to Madeleine Bernard (Emile Bernard’s sister), with whom he was infatuated. The distorted self-portrait was in keeping with its medium of stoneware—according to Gauguin, taking on the appearance of being ‘scorched in the ovens of hell’, as if ‘glimpsed by Dante on his tour of the Inferno’.2

The other reference work Gauguin includes in his self-portrait is a cropped mirror image of his painting The yellow Christ 18893, painted not long before.The yellow Christ was one of Gauguin’s most important paintings of this period, interpreting a religious subject in a radical style combining traditional Christian imagery with a fantastic coloured palette. The motif of the Christ was derived from a polychrome wooden sculpture of a crucifixion from the eighteenth century, in the Chapel of Trémalo near Pont-Aven. Gauguin’s Christ, however, is painted in brilliant yellows, oranges and browns, blues and greens. The almost abstract forms, outlined in blue, add further to his radical interpretation of the subject and are a perfect summation of Gauguin’s mature Pont-Aven style.

The incorporation of these two important works in his self-portrait reveals much about the artist’s self-perception—Gauguin considers himself both martyr and savage. His letters in late 1889 make reference to his keen sense of martyrdom in his fight against artistic mediocrity, as he writes to Bernard advising that in comparison to his own predicament, Bernard was too young ‘to carry the cross’.4 When arranging the gift of his ceramic self-portrait to Madeleine Bernard, he described the work as ‘the head of Gauguin, the savage’.5

For the self-portrait, Gauguin has set himself between these two objects which express the duality of his existence. His face seems burdened by the path he has chosen. Yet he portrays himself as a determined character, dressed simply, with a steely gaze; as a man who despite the loss of his family and his failure to sell his art continues to pursue his dream.

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