Stop and Look – Paul Gauguin’s The Dream (1897)

A Parisian by birth, Gauguin could never settle into French middle-class life, and various attempts to start a career failed. In 1886 he visited the artists’ colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany, and it was in that context that he evolved a personal painting style: inspired by the simple lives of the local country people, he evolved a very direct approach to subject matter, with simplified forms and a bold, original sense of colour. It was with a similar urge to escape mundane urban life that in the following year, 1887, he ventured much farther afield: to the remote Caribbean island of Martinique. Here he encountered the hot, rich colour and exotic flora of a sub-tropical topography, which confirmed his interest in experimenting with a challenging palette. The experience was decisive: a year or two later he took himself to the even more remote Polynesian islands of the south Pacific. and lived in Tahiti, as far as possible from “everything that is artificial and conventional” in European civilisation.     

He grafted his fascination with the native people and their way of life on to the pictorial language he had developed among the peasants of Brittany, enriching his work with his newly-developed feeling for sumptuous colour. Perhaps even more important was his discovery of the myths and beliefs that governed the Tahitians’ lives. He was able to make sense of these in terms of the current vogue for Symbolism among artists and writers in Europe: the awareness of emotional and psychological forces too profound and complex to be articulated by means of accepted forms. 

A central concept of Symbolism was the ambiguous allure of Woman: a temptress, an object of awe, of veneration, and of course of lust (which carried with it the complications of guilt). Gauguin was much taken with the beauty of the native women of Polynesia, and many of his pictures are portraits of them, especially of the wife he took (this was undoubtedly at least an exploitative relationship, if consensual) and her companions. He relished the lustrous burnished colours of their skin, which he depicted in glowing sunlight or, as in this understated example, in the shade of an interior ornamented with paintings. 

A portion of the Tahitian landscape is visible through the doorway – or is it another, more realistic painting? The pictorial language is simplified and flattened, though the figures are three-dimensional enough, reminiscent indeed of the elemental, coarsely carved wooden figures that Gauguin made while he was here. And who exactly is having the dream of the title? The baby in the ornately carved cradle, or the meditative woman with half an eye on it, and part of her mind obviously far away? Perhaps the frieze on the wall represents the content of her dream. It’s characteristic of Symbolism that the precise meaning eludes us, may in fact not be there at all, only to be inferred from the sensuous information that the artist supplies.