Short, scintillating brushstrokes describe the sculptural form of a horse’s head, a collection of Japanese fans, a Chinese doll and an open sketchbook. Gauguin’s 1886 painting Still life with horse’s head shows how actively he incorporated artistic influences. In 1886 he exhibited in the 8th Impressionist exhibition, encountering George Seurat’s breakthrough Neo-Impressionist work A Sunday afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which relies on the human eye’s tendency to combine small dots of contrasting colours. Critics later named this style ‘Pointillism’. Gauguin’s mentor Camille Pissarro and other painters such as Paul Signac enthusiastically adopted this development in their work.
Still life with horse’s head is Gauguin’s tentative exploration of these latest ideas in painting, and reflects his growing enthusiasm for Japanese and Chinese art. Japan, which had been closed to the West since the 1600s, resumed trading relations in the 1860s: Japanese art and design object proliferated through art circles in Europe, and many artists adopted new aesthetic ideas. Gauguin’s contemporaries such as Claude Monet incorporated Japanese fans, kimonos and designs into their compositions. This is reflected in objects Gauguin included in this still life and his deliberate close cropping of the composition, a technique borrowed from Japanese prints and their distinctive, stylised compositions.
In contrast, the horse’s head, originally carved in the 5th Century BCE, represents the enduring influence of ancient Greece on European art and culture. It is based on one of the Parthenon marbles, a contested group of marble sculptures held in the British Museum. It is believed that Gauguin may have seen the horse’s head during a fleeting visit to London in late August 1885, and it is likely that he purchased one of the widely available plaster reproductions of the sculpture that were used as teaching aids for art students.
In both style and subject, the juxtaposition of East and West prefigures the complexity of the artist’s subsequent interests and is characteristic of the bowerbird-like approach that defined his creative process and studio environment. For example, when Gauguin later travelled to the Pacific he surrounded himself with photographic reproductions and sketches of works by other European artists and from a variety of cultures that he encountered during his travels.
