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“I believe that the thought which has guided my work, a part of my work, is mysteriously linked with a thousand other thoughts, some my own, some those of others. There are days of idle imagination from which I recall long studies, often sterile, more often troubling: a black cloud has just darkened the horizon; confusion overtakes my soul and I am unable to do anything. If in other hours of bright sunshine and a clear mind I attach myself to such and such a fact, or vision, or bit of reading, I feel I must make some brief record of it, perpetuate the memory of it.”

—Paul Gauguin, Intimate Journals

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

A nude young woman lies on her back amid bright fields of pink, green, blue, and gold. A fox, his sly eyes engaging the viewer, has firmly placed his paw upon the woman’s heart. With her left hand she holds the fox; in her right, a plucked flower wilts, its stem intertwined in her fingers. The woman’s pale white feet are crossed, and her face wears a fixed and distant expression. In the mid-ground, a group of peasants strolls along a path nestled in a field, its wheat harvested and sheaved in preparation for the approaching winter. A picturesque coastline lies beyond, its cool azure waters broken only by a distant rocky outcropping.

WHO WAS THE ARTIST, AND WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LANDSCAPE?

Paul Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848, but he lived and worked far from the French mainland for long periods of his youth and adulthood. After his father’s death, Gauguin spent his early childhood in Peru with his sister and mother, who was of Spanish-Peruvian ancestry. At the age of 17 Gauguin joined the French navy, for which he traveled extensively as a merchant marine. He returned to France in 1871 and became a stockbroker. He married Mette Gad, a Danish woman living in France. During this period, Gauguin began painting. His friendship with the painter Camille Pissarro led to his exhibiting with the Impressionists, and Gauguin was so taken by creating art that he abandoned Mette, their five children, and his career in 1886 to devote himself to painting and sculpture. He died on the Marquesas Islands in 1903.

In his work, Gauguin searched for “the savage and the primitive,” or man in his most natural and original state. At first, he found inspiration in the people living in the northern French province of Brittany, who retained the customs, lifestyle, and dress of their Celtic forebears. In Brittany, Gauguin lived and worked at the artist colony at Pont-Aven and the even more secluded village of Le Pouldu. It is the outskirts of Le Pouldu that the artist has pictured in The Loss of Virginity. After brief periods in Paris and the southern French province of Provence—where he worked with Vincent van Gogh—Gauguin eventually sought to retreat from European society entirely. In 1891 he moved to French Polynesia, where he produced many of his best-known works, such as The Spirit of the Dead Watches Over Her and Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

WHAT IS THE STYLE OF THIS WORK?

Early in his career, Gauguin worked in the Impressionist style (see works by Edgar Degas and Pierre Renoir). When he traveled to Brittany, however, Gauguin began to experiment with Post-Impressionist manners that he found in the works of other artists living there. One of these styles, seen here, is Synthetism, or Cloisonism. Synthetism sought to reject naturalism in favor of symbolism.

Naturalism – An artist’s attempt to represent objects exactly as they appear in nature.
Symbolism – An artist’s use of colors, shapes, and objects to convey feelings, ideas, and moods to the viewer.

In this work, Gauguin has included many symbols to convey the central idea—the sacrifice of a young woman’s virginity. The plucked flower that the maiden holds in her right hand represents lost innocence, while the sly-eyed fox foreshadows her downfall as he places his paw over her heart. In Indian mythology, the fox symbolizes perversity, and in Andean myths, it is thought to be an “animal of the devil.” The harvested wheat stands for fertility and nature, and the Bretons on the path—believed to have just attended a wedding—may signify the woman’s longing for respectability. Finally, the position of the woman’s feet recalls images of the crucifixion, thus calling to mind personal sacrifice—here, the sacrifice of her virginity.

WHO IS THE MAIDEN, AND WHY DOES SHE LOOK SO SAD?

The young woman pictured in The Loss of Virginity was Juliette Huet, a seamstress whom Gauguin met in Paris around the same time that the work was painted. By the time Gauguin left for Tahiti, Huet was pregnant and eventually gave birth to a daughter. A letter that the artist wrote after his departure suggests that he felt guilty for leaving his mistress: “Poor Juliette with a child, and now I can’t help her…It happened in spite of everything; God knows the conditions under which I did it.” The fox, then, may have represented even more for Gauguin: quite possibly, he meant for the fox to denote his personal role in the woman’s loss of innocence and physical purity.

— Kristi McMillan

SOURCES

Gauguin, Paul. Gauguin’s Intimate Journals. Translated by Van Wyck Brooks. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958.

Gauguin, Paul. The Letters of Paul Gauguin to Georges Daniel de Monfried. Translated by Ruth Pielkovo. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1922.

Harrison, Jefferson C. French Paintings from the Chrysler Museum. Norfolk, VA: The Chrysler Museum, 1986.

Welsh-Ovcharov, Bogomila. Vincent van Gogh and the Birth of Cloisonism, ex. cat. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1981.

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