Sabots

Gauguin was intrigued by the customs of the Breton people and their harmony with the surrounding nature. While in Brittany, he focused on motifs—a young woman in traditional dress, cows, geese and sheep—which fixed the character of the region and its people in his mind. Carved in 1890, right before the artist’s first trip to Tahiti, the present pair of sabots depict Breton women (right) and geese (left). The subject is a pertinent one for Gauguin, which figures in many of his major paintings from the period. The seated woman in Breton Shepherdess, for example, appears again, more abstractly, as the carved decoration of the right shoe, and the pairing of the woman with a goose is also illustrated in Bretonne et oie au bord de l'eau.
Gauguin delighted in wearing the wooden clogs. He 'caused a sensation by wearing Breton shoes in Paris,' according to Charles Morice (quoted in C. Gray, Sculpture and Ceramics of Paul Gauguin, New York, 1980, p. 200). 'I like living in Brittany; here I find a savage, primitive quality,' Gauguin wrote to his painter friend Claude-Emile Schuffenecker, the first owner of the sabots, in February 1888. 'When my wooden shoes echo on the granite ground, I hear the dull, muted, powerful sound I am looking for in painting' (D. Guérin, ed., Paul Gauguin: The Writings of a Savage, New York, 1978, p. 23).