Woman with Figs
Sheet: 17 1/2 × 23 1/2 inches (44.45 × 59.69 cm)
The Prints of Armand Séguin 1869-1903, Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, February 8-March 14, 1980, no. 80.
From Farm to Table: Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterworks on Paper, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, March 16, 2018-March 17, 2019, no cat.
Though it is native to the Middle East and western Asia, fig trees thrive in many places throughout the world, including Brittany, in northwestern France. Paul Gauguin’s friend and fellow collaborator on this print, Armand Séguin, had a fig tree in the backyard of his home in the small Breton village of Saint-Julien. Its bounty must have supplemented Séguin’s table and sparked Gauguin’s imagination, as seen here. Gauguin employed simplified forms and a crude drawing style to express the primitive qualities he associated with this remote region.
Karen Dean Bunting (Mrs. George H. Bunting, Jr., 1912-1981), Shawnee Mission, KS, by October 7, 1977;
Her gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1977.
Richard S. Field, Cynthia L. Strauss, and Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr., The Prints of Armand Séguin 1869-1903, exh. cat. (Middletown, CT: Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University, 1980).
Marcel Guérin, L'oeuvre gravé de Gauguin (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1980), no. 88.
Elizabeth Mongan, Eberhard W. Kornfeld, and Harold Joachim, Paul Gauguin, Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints (Bern, Switzerland: Galerie Kornfeld, 1988), no. 25 III/III.
George L. McKenna, Prints, 1460-1995 (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1996), 292, (repro.), as Le Femmes aux Figues.
