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Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903)
The Loss of Virginity, 1890-1891
Oil on canvas, 35-1/2 x 51-1/4 inches
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.

Compared with the traditional and often sentimental subjects reserved for images of women in late-19th-century French art, the theme of Gauguin's painting--the loss of sexual innocence--
must have seemed shocking, a direct challenge to conservative, middle-class taste. The painting's blunt, schematic style--the broad, flat bands of bright color bounded by dark outlines--must have seemed equally radical, reflecting the artist's interest in the avant-garde aesthetic known as Synthetism. Following the dictates of Synthetism, Gauguin rejected realistic representation in favor of a more purely Symbolist approach to form, using the colors, shapes, and objects of the visible world as subjective allusions to ideas and moods.

Lying deathlike on the ground, the naked maiden holds a plucked flower (an iris?), a traditional symbol of innocence lost. With her left hand she embraces an evil-eyed fox, which precipitates her downfall with a paw upon her heart. (Gauguin called the fox a symbol of "perversity" or lust.) The landscape is that of Le Pouldu, a secluded spot on the Brittany coast where the artist often worked in the late 1880s. The time is autumn, the dying season. The grain in the fields has been harvested, and a sheaf of it lies at the maiden's feet, where it serves as a melancholy reference to the "reaping" of her purity. The group of Breton peasants in the background--a wedding party, perhaps, or a group of churchgoers--may represent the world of respectability from which the girl is now excluded.

Gauguin's symbolic treatment of the painful passage from maidenhood to womanhood may have had a highly personal meaning for him. The woman who modeled for The Loss of Virginity --a young seamstress named Juliette Huet --was Gauguin's mistress at the time. The artist met Huet in Paris in 1890, and though she was pregnant with his daughter, he abandoned her when he departed the following year for Tahiti.

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