A Breton Woman Walking; Sketch with Stairs [verso] 1884 - 1888

Curator: This unassuming diptych before us presents two pencil sketches, likely from between 1884 and 1888, attributed to Paul Gauguin: *A Breton Woman Walking*, paired on the same sheet with the tantalizing fragment *Sketch with Stairs [verso]*. What's your initial take? Editor: Well, it's like stumbling upon someone's fleeting thought. A kind of visual shorthand that makes me strangely melancholic. Gauguin's distilled reality to barely-there lines. Curator: Precisely! Consider how the lone woman’s form in the first sketch—she’s almost swallowed by the blank space around her. There’s this immediate tension between presence and absence, and even between portrait and landscape. And how about its structural contrast? Editor: Tell me more... Curator: The weight in her lower body, the shading there really anchors the figure within its frame, against the very light rendering of her back and head, giving the body momentum against its immediate background. On the opposite side, this interplay almost evaporates leaving almost just landscape. Editor: Right, on the "verso" side with the stairs... that almost haphazard arrangement of vertical lines suggests the solidity of a staircase and some surrounding plants but does very little to really communicate their form other than suggesting movement and dimension, giving me the same feeling as walking alone or with one other in a misty field with little clarity, maybe sadness as well? It's impressionistic in a truly naked sense; not even a lick of color. What strikes me as odd is how this duality feels very present but is just there through some strokes... like very rapid sketching. Curator: That echoes his constant movement in the 1880s between Paris and Brittany—Gauguin searched for something raw, authentic… something beyond the Salon conventions. These sketches function like notes towards a bigger idea that was forever escaping his pencil tip! The rawness IS the feeling. Editor: Agreed, like whispers caught on the wind rather than definitive pronouncements. The feeling I get now isn't quite sad... More… suspended. It’s a poignant visual haiku. Curator: Beautifully put. Let’s move on to consider another facet.