Projet d’assiette (Leda) (Design for a Plate [Leda]), frontispiece from the Volpini Suite after 1889

Paul Gauguin made this lithograph, ‘Design for a Plate (Leda),’ as the frontispiece for the ‘Volpini Suite’. It shows a woman with a swan wrapped around her neck. The image refers to the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, where Zeus seduces Leda in the guise of a swan. Gauguin made this print in France, toward the end of the 19th century, as part of an album of prints he exhibited at the Café des Arts on the sidelines of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Gauguin sought to challenge the art establishment by setting up alternative venues to exhibit and sell art outside the official Salon system. The Café des Arts was one of these venues. In the lithograph, Gauguin inverts the racial dynamics of the original myth, depicting Leda as a Polynesian woman, perhaps critiquing European colonial attitudes and sexual exploitation of women of colour. To understand this artwork, scholars rely on primary sources such as letters, exhibition reviews, and sales records. The meaning of art is always contingent on its historical and institutional context.