This vibrant examination of Paul Gauguin's life and work features more than fifty pieces from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek collection in Copenhagen, including paintings, wood carvings, and ceramics along with Oceanic art and Gauguin's works on paper from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's permanent collections. Each piece is reproduced in exquisite detail, offering a superb opportunity to enjoy Gauguin's groundbreaking use of color, line, and form. Essays examine Gauguin's relationships and reveal the struggles, indulgences, awakenings, and betrayals of his personal and professional life. Other essays provide new insights into Gauguin's travels to the far reaches of the French colonial empire in the Pacific and explore his cultural identity, sexuality, and spirituality. Beautifully designed to complement Gauguin's extraordinary oeuvre, this book offers a refreshing take on an artist whose life and work continue to fascinate to the present day.

The book is edited by Cornelia Homburg and Christopher Riopelle and is being published to coincide with the exhibition of the same title to be held at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (May 24 - September 8, 2019), and at the National Gallery in London (October 7, 2019 - January 26, 2020). The exhibition will display some sixty works by Gauguin - paintings, works on paper, and three-dimensional objects made of various materials - from public and private collections throughout the world. It is the aim of Gauguin. Portraits to fill this gap in the scholarly examination of one of the leading figures in Post-Impressionism. There is much to discover about the attributes he endowed his models with and the evocative settings he chose for them, highly charged as these props were with symbolic meanings. This book, which is intended as a standard text in this specific field, includes essays written by an array of experts in Gauguin's work, all established scholars and young researchers. University and museum specialists combine their talents to explore in-depth the many aspects of the artist's portraits, often in the light of the remarks he made about his models. The authors focus in particular on the importance and different meanings portraits had for Gauguin in his oeuvre. Text in French.