Paul Gauguin's Brooding Woman and Gabrielle with Jewel Box by Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Essay Example

Compare and contrast the two images, Paul Gauguin’s ‘Brooding Woman’ and ‘Gabrielle with Jewel Box’ by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. These two artists are both linked and separate. Renoir, 1841 – 1919 was born in Limoges. Gauguin was born in Paris only 7 years later. So both are artists of late 19th century France. Both were able to take advantage of the technical advances of the time – the new colours and tube paints that had come in the 1840’s and the ease of transport that had come with the expansion of the French railways by many thousands of miles that opened up the whole country as a potential studio. They are linked too by Paul Cézanne, alongside whom Renoir had exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition of April 1874. He, along with Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh later exhibited their works at the Parisian shop of colour merchant Pére Tanguy and Gauguin exhibited at the impressionist exhibitions from 1880 onwards, finally taking the step from amateur and part time artist to professional in January 1883, when he took the dramatic decision that he no longer intended to support his wife and family in an ordinary occupation. Although both artists painted landscapes, and still life’s such as Gauguin’s ‘Sacred mountain’ of 1892 and his ‘Still life with the painting “Hope”’ and Renoir’s ‘Fruits from the Midi’ of 1881 and ‘The meadow ‘of 1873, the majority of their work is of people, especially women. Gauguin of course travelled to the South Seas, the first time in 1891, in search of the simple life. He saw civilization as a disease whereas Renoir seemed to thrive in city life and this is reflected in these two pictures. Many have given up financial security for art but Gauguin did more. He forsook his home, financial security, his friends and family in pursuit of an ideal. On the obverse however he was thinking only of himself and his own ambitions. Renoir on the other hand thrived on a happy family life. He was the third of four children from a working class family, unlike most of his fellow Impressionists who tended to come from middle class backgrounds. His son Jean, a film director, describes their happy home in his book, Renoir, my Father.’ His picture is of one of his favourite models, and like all his work there is no hint of sadness in the picture although it is perhaps a little contemplative .Gabrielle came to the family as nurse for the children, later became housekeeper and finally nursed the aged Renoir. She is seated in contemplative mood picking at the contents of her jewel box – a very middle class scene. She appears in the same costume in other paintings such as ‘Gabrielle with an open blouse’ 1907 and ‘Gabrielle with a Rose’, 1911, though she also appears more modestly clothed especially in early pictures with the Renoir children. In this painting she seems to emerge from the silk like cocoon of her costume. Although his wife Aline often modelled for him we hardly ever see her except in outdoor scenes. Before the 1880’s Renoir hardly ever considered nudes. Impressionism was more concerned with the life of contemporary Paris, but from that time on nudes or partially dressed women were frequent subjects. Of his nude and semi-nude works Keith Wheldon quotes Renoir as saying ‘I look at a nude and see myriads of tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh come alive and quiver on my canvas’ Gauguin, the son of a journalist and a Peruvian Creole mother, painted his picture in 1891.’Brooding woman’, Te Faaturuma in Tahitian, an oil on canvas, now in the Worcester Art Museum, but once owned by Degas, was painted on an early visit to Tahiti and shows a much simpler home, clean but unfurnished, and so reflecting the simpler life that Gauguin preferred. At about the same time he wrote his book ‘Noa Noa’ in which he says ‘I have escaped everything that is artificial and conventional.’ His model is dressed in a simple shift, no shoes and apparently no underclothes looking at the hot fish in the bowl, but doing nothing with it. She just sits, brooding. The picture is very similar to a later work of 1897 ‘Te Rereioa’ or ‘The Dream’ although that has two women, the position of the one is front is very similar to the model in the earlier work. She even has her hand on her chin and the cat is present. There is the same heaviness and darkness about the picture in which the models seem almost glued down, whereas Gabrielle looks as if she might stand up at any moment. This again reflects the life of the artists. Renoir lived in the town or city where life moved at a pace. He liked a good standard of living. Once when staying with Cézanne he moved out to a hotel at some cost because of what he described as ‘the meanness of the house.’ Gauguin had always travelled – he joined the Merchant Marine in 1865 and travelled from Le Harve to Rio de Janiero, so in some ways it was not such a huge step for him to leave France as it may seem. He preferred the slower, simpler life that he found in Tahiti to the bustle of Paris. Renoir’s painting, a late one of 1910, now in the Skira collection in Geneva, shows Gabrielle also in a fairly simple negligee over her bare breasts, though the costume is perhaps more luxurious than that worn by Gauguin’s model. There are roses on top of the ornately carved table. No one would mistake this for the South Seas. Renoir had started out at the age of 13 as a painter of decorative china and ladies fans in Paris and this early period is reflected in the colours and style that he preferred. It is he who introduced to the Impressionists the ’rainbow’ palette i.e. one which eliminated the use of black. Another part of his technique was divisionism. That is a technique in which shades are not obtained by mixing before being applied to the canvas, but by applying tiny areas of pure colour so that when viewed from a certain distance they combined in the brain of the viewer. This method gives the work a great luminosity and brilliance and is well exemplified in this picture which shines out from the canvas. This style might be described as more approachable than that of Gauguin. The light clear colours have an attraction for the viewer without requiring a great deal of effort on their part. This attractiveness and general accessibility were reflected in sales as at the Grafton Gallery Impressionist exhibition when Renoir outsold all other artists. This is in complete contrast to the heavier, darker colours favoured by Gauguin. This method of divisionism was studied scientifically by certain other artists such as Seurat, founder of the neo-impressionism school and came to its height in pointillism , as exemplified in his famous ‘La Grande Jatte’, a technique whereby the colour is applied in tiny spots. The eye mixes the chromatic light beams into one solid colour when viewed from the correct distance. Ogden Rood, in his book ‘Modern Chromatics’ of 1879, described it as the mixing not of pigments, but of beams of coloured light. Gauguin’s background is perhaps rather more complicated than most. He spent his childhood in Lima, Peru, and after time at sea became a stockbroker. After meeting Pissarro he visited the first Impresionist exhibition and from that time on worked part-time as an artist. Gauguin’s work seems to require more from the viewer than that of Renoir. Many of his works are symbolic. Think of some of his titles – ‘Why are you angry?’or Whence do we come from?, What are we?, Where are we going?’. The heavier style is possibly linked to the influence of Cézanne with his structural analysis of nature and its basic forms and his desire to make of his art something solid and enduring rather than chase after the changing effects of light that dominated the art of many of his contemporaries. Another influence was that of the symbolist writers of both France and Belgium whom he met in the 1890’s.at their regular meetings in the Café Voltaire, Paris. He met with them immediately before leaving on his first visit to Tahiti where this picture was painted. So important was this trip to him that he sold many of his works in order to finance the trip, making no provision for his family while he was away. The symbolists believed that scenes depicted in art, whether in poetry or pictures, should aim to capture absolute truths. They used symbols and suggestion rather than making more direct statements. So we see that although these two pictures could be described as ‘Seated Woman’ they come with very different messages because of the different backgrounds, ideas and influences of the artists concerned. Books used Alley, Robert, Gauguin, The Colour Library of Art. Hamlyn, Middlesex, 1968 Denvir, Bernard, The Chronicle of Impressionism’ Thames and Hudson, London 1993 Goldwater, Robert, Gauguin, from the Library of Great Painters, Harry N.Abrams Inc. New York, 1928 Katz, Robert and Dars Celestine, The Impressionists in Context, Abbeydale Press, Leicestershire, 2003 Osborne, Harold, editor,The Oxford Companion to Art, Oxford University Press, 1970 Renoir, Jean,’Renoir : My Father’,translated from the French, Little Brown and Co.London,1962 Wheldon, Keith ‘Renoir and His Art’ Hamlyn Publishing Company, London 1975 Electronic sources Gauguin’s ‘Brooding Woman, found at Worcester Art Museum http://www.worcesterart.org/Collection/European/1921.186.html retrieved 13th December 2006 Renoir’s ‘Gabrielle and the jewel box’ found at Euro Art Gallery, http://www.latifm.com/Renoir/renoir_gabrielle_with_jewl_box.htm retrieved 13th December 2006 Read More