French Artist Paul Gauguin and an Artwork Mystery - Did the Famed Artist Paint his Self-Proclaimed Finest Work using a First Draft?

This article starts with the following question: did renowned French artist Paul Gauguin paint a first “draft” - or “preparatory” and strikingly similar - same scale version of his self-proclaimed finest work known as “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”??

Discussion.

In the winter of 1897, Paul Gauguin was living in Tahiti, and he started (likely in the last part of 1897) and completed (probably in the first part of 1898) a large and stylistically complex painting which is known in English as “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”??

Gauguin himself inscribed the original title in French in the upper left corner of the canvas, and the work was (according to Gauguin) a symbolic representation of themes of life and the human life cycle.

In order to capture that cycle in the composition, Gauguin revealed in letters that he intended the artwork to be studied or “read” from right to left. Thus, it begins with a sleeping infant in the far right, shows a standing youth in the center, and ends with the? figure of a crouching and elderly woman at the far left.

He said it was “a philosophical work on a theme comparable to that of the Gospel.” The Wisdom of Paul Gauguin - Artist, International Studio, vol. 73, number 291.?

According to most art historians, Gauguin viewed the piece as his magnum opus. In a letter Gauguin wrote to his friend about the painting, he claimed that this work surpassed all of his prior works, and further asserted that he completed the piece within the period of one month and then went into the mountains to attempt suicide by an overdose of arsenic. His suicide effort (if there really was one) was not successful, and he continued to live in French Polynesia until his death on May 8, 1903.

Gauguin also said this of his endeavors on the painting: “I worked day and night that whole month in an incredible fever. Lord knows it is not done like a Puvis de Chavannes: sketch after nature, preparatory cartoon, etc. It is all done from imagination, straight from the brush, on sackcloth full of knots and wrinkles, so the appearance is terribly rough.” The Gauguin Organization.

Several months after finishing the painting, Gauguin sent it to Paris for exhibition. It ended up being moved between art galleries and some private collections in France and elsewhere until the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston acquired it in 1936.

What follows is a photograph of the painting that I took at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on May 12, 2022.

The next photograph is one that I took of a painting hanging on the wall of my brother’s home in Beverly Hills, California.

The two paintings are very nearly (almost exactly) the same size. The one in the Boston museum (“Boston Painting”) is signed and framed, while the one hanging in my brother’s home (“Beverly Hills Painting”)? is not signed or framed - although it is inscribed in French by Gauguin. That was the conclusion of a former FBI handwriting expert retained to examine the inscriptions on the two paintings, as well as other Gauguin writings. This is discussed more fully below.

When the two paintings are examined closely, they are strikingly similar, but there are differences. Thus, one is not a copy of the other. Rather, there are variations between the paintings that can be seen when they are carefully examined.

While I am not an art historian, art expert, or a specialist connoisseur of Paul Gauguin, I have viewed (at galleries and museums) a number of his paintings, and spent a great deal of time (countless hours) looking - up close and personal - at and examining both the Boston Painting and the Beverly Hills Painting (as they hang on walls on opposite sides of the U.S. and some 3000 miles apart), and I believe that both works were painted by the same person, Paul Gauguin.

My view is supported by a woman who was a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and is now the curator of an art museum in Texas. She opined that the Beverly Hills Painting was painted by Gauguin “first”, followed by the Boston Painting, which he then signed. This was her conclusion after visiting my brother’s home in Beverly Hills and looking at the Beverly Hills Painting several years ago.

Yet another art expert, who works at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, looked at the Beverly Hills Painting and did not think that the brush strokes looked right as far as being done by Gauguin. But he did not say the painting was not done by Gauguin, and suggested that more analysis and study should be undertaken.?

And importantly, he was not comparing the Beverly Hills Painting with and in comparison to the Boston Painting (both on “sackcloth” - a burlap type of material), since the two were geographically apart.?

Also, it should be noted that a number of Gauguin’s smaller paintings on canvas (and not on rough sackcloth) look quite different (and much more refined).? An example of such a painting is provided below:

The Beverly Hills Painting was purchased from a woman in Montecito, CA in or around the year 2000, and she and her family owned it for some 40 years or more before that. Unfortunately, she did not know how or the exact date her family gained possession of the painting, and could not provide any information on its origin or history.?

Because the Beverly Hills painting is not signed, a former FBI handwriting expert was retained (as mentioned above) by my brother to give her opinion relative to the inscription on the artwork. After she studied the three lines of handwritten inscription against those on the Boston Painting - as well as other writings of Paul Gauguin, she concluded that the inscription was written by Gauguin. What she told my brother is that she “had no doubt” that the inscription was done by Gauguin.

The photograph immediately below is of the inscription on the Boston Painting:

It is followed by a photograph of the inscription on the Beverly Hills Painting:

Before going further, I must apologize for the quality and brightness (of certain colors and hues) of some of the photographs accompanying this writing. Some of the photographs were taken using an iPhone 6S and others were from an iPhone 12 Pro. And the lighting in the Boston Museum is different than that in my brother’s living room.

In addition to having the writing of the inscriptions compared and analyzed - against each other and with respect to other writings of Paul Gauguin - by a handwriting expert, a scientific analysis of the paint and the material used for the canvas for the Beverly Hills Painting was performed by two laboratories.

Paint on the artwork was dated to the 1890s and the paint specimens were consistent with the type of paint used by Gauguin.?

The canvas was determined to be of a durable woven hessian burlap, the type used by Gauguin, and would fit the description given by Gauguin. Namely, “sackcloth full of knots and wrinkles, so the appearance is terribly rough.”

Some of the roughness can be seen in the texture around the inscription of the Beverly Hills Painting (see above).

What follows is another close-up of a scene in the Beverly Hills Painting and the burlap-based canvas can be seen quite clearly.

Also, what follows are two photographs of the back of the Beverly Hills Painting, and they show the canvas "sackcloth" material quite clearly.

The second photograph (immediately above) provides a closeup of the material and shows paint that has penetrated and passed through the sackcloth.

The next photograph shows a close-up of one of the figures in the Boston Painting, and the sackcloth canvas of that painting can clearly be seen underneath the paint:

In addition to dating much of the paint on the Beverly Hills Painting to the time of Gauguin’s work in Tahiti, the vellum/adhesive used to attach the painting to its backing was also dated to the 1890s.

One of the analyses of the Beverly Hills Painting also concluded that it had also been?touched up with more modern paints sometime in the 1930s.?

Interestingly, the art curator who previously worked at the Boston Fine Arts Museum stated that the Boston Painting had had similar “touch up” work done. She stated further that their paint testing was conducted “in house”, and no outside entities were used. And she added that the Boston Museum has only internal reports which are never released.

In doing research for this piece, I read that Paul Gauguin carefully designed the ways in which he was perceived, and was not always truthful in those designations.?

In that regard, he did not kill himself in 1898, and it is not known if he ever endeavored to end his life.?

Also, and curiously, he sometimes presented himself as an artist who “worked off-hand and without preparation”. Yet, that was not the case.

On the website of Sotheby’s (the broker of fine and decorative art, among other things), in an article dated November 15, 2019, and providing facts about Gauguin, it is stated that Gauguin “claimed in letters to friends that he worked without a preliminary sketch for his masterpiece Where do we come from? What are we, where are we going? - though an early sketch of the work does exist. See sothebys.com, 21 Facts About Paul Gauguin (Nov. 15, 2019).

Other materials and books I read about Gauguin stated that he would sometimes create same scale “near copy” paintings.??

As part of my research, I also came across a video done by authors Moshay-Teekamp, who had done a study of Gauguin.? It includes “pairs” of near copy paintings, and even shows a purported sketch of the painting “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”

The video is on YouTube and is linked here:? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4tx1mcg4hg. The title of the video is “Gauguin's Drawings & Paintings, A New Look at an Old Master," and it is both engaging and thought-provoking.

Conclusion.

In coming to the end of this writing, it is time to return to the question asked in the beginning of this article:? did renowned French artist Paul Gauguin paint a first “draft” - or “preparatory” and strikingly similar - same scale version of his self-proclaimed finest work known as “Where do we? from? What are we? Where are we going?”??

The question stated a bit differently is this: did Paul Gauguin paint the Beverly Hills Painting first and then innovate and change it?slightly and paint the Boston Painting???

I believe, as does a former art curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, that the Beverly Hills Painting was a near final and "first" draft used by Gauguin to create the Boston Painting.

In conjunction with the above, I would maintain and argue that:

? The artist intended that the two paintings would be slightly different from each other (as noted above, neither is a copy of the other). What is unclear and curious is why the “first” (if it was a Gauguin "near final draft") was not destroyed by Gauguin. Similarly, why did Gauguin not eliminate the sketch of the work? Both items prove the falsity of his assertion that the work was done straight out of his imagination.

? Both paintings are original works.?

It would be most fascinating and instructive to hang the two paintings on a wall with one above the other, but the former curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts told my brother that that would never be permitted by the Boston Museum.

So where do we go from here?

More examinations and views of the Beverly Hills Painting, more scientific and technical tests, and more art specialists and Gauguin experts.

If any of the readers of this article have any insights, comments, or thoughts to share, my brother and I would welcome those. I can be reached at [email protected] Thank?you, very much, for reading this.

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About the author: Wayne S. Bell is a CA-based lawyer who was a Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UCLA, and a graduate of Loyola Law School, Los Angeles (where he was the Chief Note and Comment Editor of the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review). He also completed an Advanced Management Program at Rutgers University and the Program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. In addition to other activities, including the provision of services as an expert witness, he currently works with a Foundation and provides legal work, and research and evaluative services relative to works of art.