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Lot Essay
Gauguin painted Dahlias et mandoline—an allegory of his developing ideas about art—in 1883, in the midst of a full-scale questioning of the aims and methods of atmospheric Impressionism. He was closer than ever at this time to his Impressionist mentor Pissarro, and he had his best opportunity yet to study the work of the first-generation Impressionists at the series of solo shows that Durand-Ruel mounted in spring 1883. Nevertheless, stimulated by Cézanne’s radical approach to composition and facture, Gauguin increasingly cultivated an experimental, anti-Impressionist streak in his own art, seeking to convey his instinctive “sensations of the heart.” In mid-1883, he received notice of his impending dismissal from his job as a stockbroker—a financial crisis for his growing family, but one that ultimately liberated him to pursue his artistic quest full-time.
Gauguin derived the compositional schema for this densely worked still-life from one of his most treasured possessions—Cézanne’s Nature morte au compotier, 1879-1880 (Rewald, no. 418), which later served as a focal point of Denis's Homme à Cézanne, 1900, and hung for decades in the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller. The tabletop is partially covered with a textile and tilted slightly upward, while the background wall runs parallel to the picture surface, creating a compressed, frieze-like space. The fringed tapestry offers a visual analogue for Gauguin’s experimentation with a systematic, woven facture comprised of warps and wefts of colored lines, most notable in the gold-toned background plane. The “real” dahlias find an echo in the painted flowers on the ceramic planter (which appears as well in Wildenstein, no. 95), calling attention to the artifice of the entire ensemble.
Although Gauguin did not learn to play the mandolin until his sojourn at Le Pouldu in 1889, the instrument features prominently in his work well before this time (Wildenstein, nos. 63-64 and 169). Here, the mandolin acts as an emblem for musical harmony of the sort that Gauguin sought to achieve through the interrelationship of shape and color in his art. “Like music,” he explained, “painting acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses, harmonious hues correspond to harmonious sounds, but in painting one obtains a unity that is impossible in music” (“Notes synthétiques,” 1884-1885; quoted in Gauguin, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 28).
Gauguin derived the compositional schema for this densely worked still-life from one of his most treasured possessions—Cézanne’s Nature morte au compotier, 1879-1880 (Rewald, no. 418), which later served as a focal point of Denis's Homme à Cézanne, 1900, and hung for decades in the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller. The tabletop is partially covered with a textile and tilted slightly upward, while the background wall runs parallel to the picture surface, creating a compressed, frieze-like space. The fringed tapestry offers a visual analogue for Gauguin’s experimentation with a systematic, woven facture comprised of warps and wefts of colored lines, most notable in the gold-toned background plane. The “real” dahlias find an echo in the painted flowers on the ceramic planter (which appears as well in Wildenstein, no. 95), calling attention to the artifice of the entire ensemble.
Although Gauguin did not learn to play the mandolin until his sojourn at Le Pouldu in 1889, the instrument features prominently in his work well before this time (Wildenstein, nos. 63-64 and 169). Here, the mandolin acts as an emblem for musical harmony of the sort that Gauguin sought to achieve through the interrelationship of shape and color in his art. “Like music,” he explained, “painting acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses, harmonious hues correspond to harmonious sounds, but in painting one obtains a unity that is impossible in music” (“Notes synthétiques,” 1884-1885; quoted in Gauguin, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 28).