Heads of a Boy and a Man 1884 - 1888

Paul Gauguin sketched these "Heads of a Boy and a Man" with pencil. It's a study, a glimpse into the artist's process, with a grid laid over the boy's head. Consider the profile, a motif stretching back to antiquity. Roman emperors stamped their likeness onto coins, power made visible in the curve of a nose, the set of a jaw. The Renaissance masters revived this form, imbuing their portraits with classical gravitas. Here, Gauguin echoes this history, yet disrupts it. The lines are raw, unfinished. The grid imprisons the boy's head, hinting at a tension between freedom and constraint, perhaps reflecting Gauguin's own struggles. This isn't mere portraiture; it is a meditation on the act of seeing, of capturing a likeness, a fleeting moment made permanent on paper. The subconscious yearns to fix the ephemeral, and in these lines, we find a potent symbol of our shared human desire.