 Hello and welcome to Barns Takeout, your daily serving of art. I'm Nancy Eisen and I'm the Gunn Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation. Now I want you to join me today and pretend that you're in the Barnes Foundation, that you're in Room 7, which is a wonderfully rich room, and that we're going to look at a painting by Paul Gauguin. And here we are in Room 7, we're looking at the wall with the Gauguin on it. There are many other delights in this space. There's a wonderful painting by Renoir in the centre of the room. There's a Monet just next to it to the left. And if you go one over still, you'll get to this wonderful painting that Gauguin made in 1890. And we're going to just zoom right in there and then focus in. So here we have the painting in question. It's by Gauguin, a French artist, and it was made in 1890, so right at the end of the 19th century. And it's of a boy called Louis Lyray, and it's called Monsieur Loulou, which is a nickname for the child. And actually, if you just look in the corner of the painting, you can see that Gauguin's signature, the PGO there, and 1890, the date the work was made. And a little inscription that says, Monsieur Loulou Souvenir, which means to Mr. Loulou a memory or a souvenir. So what we see here is a painting that was made and we presume given to the child's parents. This wonderful portrait of a child was probably destined for friends of Gauguin. We know that the Lyray couple actually hosted Gauguin at their home, so what we see here is perhaps a gift. But really, as well as being a portrait of a child, we see this picture as being a riot of colour. You can sense that already when we were looking at it on the wall, there's this brilliant stretch of green which really pulls our eye in. And it's counterbalanced by this deep orange in the top right hand corner. And the wonderful chair on which the child sits, which is rich in pinks and purples, there's a flower that forms part of the decoration of the fabric, but really springs out to become part of a still life in the background. You sense that these wonderful floral heads, the sort of scrolling of the leaves across the fabric. And some of that patternation is also echoed in the way that the child is described. If you look at his clothing, those rich blues are tailored closely and you have these wonderful scrolls of purple just delineating the cuffs. And Gauguin's even gone in and outlined the sleeve there with touches of blue. And these heavy outlines really characterise the painting. This is a very distinctive facet of Gauguin's work. There isn't a sense of trying to create a realistic depiction of what a hand might look like or a sleeve might look like. These things are very evidently stylised. They become blocks of colour that create an overall effect. And sometimes this style is called synthesis. You really do get this kind of shorthand for colours and shapes going on. And I think you see that particularly well if you look at the hair of this child. There's a really thick black line that sets the child's profile off against the green background. If you see the way the curls of hair just echo across the white there. Again very stylised. And the bangs with this blue shadow just casting a colour across his forehead. Now it's wonderful to focus in on the child's face because we sense there's a real sensitivity to the way in which Gauguin has described this child. There's a sense of personality there of perhaps an interior world that this child might have. And that was something that was very particular to the 1800s. Philosophers were starting to become interested in the interior life of the child. And so although this might be a portrait of a young boy. We also sense that there is something more worldly going on. And perhaps some of that comes out too in this dreamlike background. You sense that this isn't a literal setting. Even if we know that the landscapes of Le Poldu were strong in colour and there were wonderful flat fields and cliffs and you could see the sea. None of that is described literally here. We instead have a sense of shapes and patterns. And we know from Gauguin's letters that this was a very important moment in his career. He writes to his friend Van Gogh about really having an insatiable appetite to do new things at this time. Gauguin was staying at a place that was fairly remote. He'd been to that region before. Brittany was popular with artists. But he wanted to get off the beaten track and so he'd gone to stay with a woman called Marie-Henry who ran an inn there for artists. And there was a gathering of artists there. They could eat cheaply and they could eat well. And this was very important to Gauguin because he wasn't wild off at that time. He'd given up a professional stock-broken career. He'd given up a career in finance to be an artist. And he wasn't selling work very easily. And so he was reliant on hospitality, perhaps to the parents of this child and also to Marie-Henry for running this inn. Unfortunately we know that that story didn't end well. When he left the inn in November of 1890, he failed to pay his bills. And so some of his works were sold by the innkeeper really to try and recuperate her costs. That didn't always work out well for Gauguin when he tried to save money. But let's not worry about the ins and outs of Gauguin's politics at this precise moment. Let's think instead of a wonderful picture of a child who's sitting very still. And perhaps if you have children of your own at this moment, you know, homeschooling, you're just hopeful that their sitting is still and as quietly as this little boy. And again, just in case you were wondering, the long hair and the clothing here wasn't unusual for a little boy at that time. It wasn't until later that boys started to have their hair worn short or dressed in more sort of masculine clothes. So really we have a sense of innocence here. A childlike portrait that perhaps all the same is is veering into the world of adult thoughts and feelings. Plenty to keep us occupied for sure. And until tomorrow, you know, please enjoy this picture, come back and see it when you do get to the barns and keep tuning in for barns takeout, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, and there'll be more to follow tomorrow. Thanks very much. Bye bye. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.