The Offering, 1902
Oil on canvas, 68.5 x 78.5 cm
Signed & dated upper left: P. Gauguin 1902
Wildenstein 624

The half-length figure of a young mother nursing her child dominates the right half of the picture; she seems to transcend the area of the picture, being cut on three sides by edges; the result is a mural-like monumentality and solemnity which conceals the religiosity of the theme. She is approached from the left by a woman bringing flowers to the child whom she is observing. Although the assitant's figure almost balances the mother, as the artist emphasizes by making her right arm parallel to the latter, her head, turned in profile and bowed toward the child, makes her smaller and subordinates her to the solemn monumentality of the mother. The dark, formally simplifying outline of the figures – developed as the "cloisonné" method with Emile Bernard in 1888 in Brittany under the influence of the Japanese woodcut – reinforces the mural-like effect, as do the closed dull-brown surfaces of the upper parts of the bodies against thecolourful background. Painted only one year before Gauguin?s death, this picture fulfils a dream of paradisiacal harmony, which the artist as a person never managed to achieve, but which he created as an inspiration for a new century.