PARIS.- Sotheby's will present for sale in Paris this exceptional painting by Paul Gauguin, Le Jardin de Pissarro, Quai du Pothuis à Pontoise, 1881.

This painting is rare for several reasons. Firstly, because of its date (early in Gauguin's career) and its very moving subject (the special relationship between Pissarro and Gauguin). Secondly, because of its provenance: it has remained in the same family since the 1920s and has only been exhibited on a handful of occasions, at Pont-Aven in 1964 and, in 2015-16, at the masterful exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art (Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse). Finally, the painting features a unique detail: the presence of the artist's first two known self-portraits on the reverse of the canvas, making it an historic work.

Unveiled for the first time in 2019, the painting aroused huge interest at the time, but was ultimately not presented at auction due to the interest shown by certain institutions. Now it can finally be presented at public auction for the first time, becoming one of the key works in the Modernités sale on 18 October in Paris at Sotheby's France new flagship building.

Rare evidence of the close relationship between Pissarro and Gauguin

This painting is emblematic of the early years of Gauguin's career as a painter. It was during the years 1879-1881 that Gauguin became an assiduous follower of Pissarro, whom he called his ‘dear Professor’, in certain letters. The two men had met in 1879 and Pissarro immediately took the young painter under his wing giving him advice and encouragement. The complicity between the two men can be seen, for example, in a four-handed drawing from 1880, now in the Musée d'Orsay, which shows a portrait of Gauguin by Pissarro juxtaposed with a portrait of Pissarro by Gauguin.

Gauguin often joined Pissarro in Pontoise, where the latter had settled. It was thanks to his elder that Gauguin began his career as a artist and learned all the new painterly techniques. The house represented in this painting is the one Pissarro lived in in Pontoise between the summer of 1881 and November 1882, on the Quai du Pothuis. Proof of the artistic friendship between the two men, Pissarro painted a picture of exactly the same view at the same time. These years were crucial for Gauguin's art. As Christophe Duvivier, Director of the Museums of Pontoise, points out: ‘With Pissarro, Gauguin learned to see a landscape and to synthesise it’. A particularly moving detail is that the figure represented under the parasol is probably Pissarro himself, who we know used to paint under an umbrella. More than a landscape, this painting is a tribute to his teacher, whose presence is suggested here.

On the reverse of the canvas, two exceptional self-portraits by the artist.

According to the catalogue raisonné of Gauguin’s oeuvre, these two self-portraits are the earliest known self-portraits by the artist. It seems certain that these self portraits were painted after the landscape. Although executed against a rough background, these two self-portraits are of exceptional quality, foreshadowing some of the most famous self-portraits that Gauguin would paint several years later.

A work at the dawn of modernity

Painted very early in Gauguin's career, this double painting is already strikingly modern. The landscape, for example, already adopts a particular and innovative composition, inspired surely by certain photographic processes. If we compare this painting with the version painted by Pissarro, all the modernity of Gauguin's work becomes apparent. His style was already part an intimation of twentieth-century artistic practices, and foreshadowed the innovations that he would make in the years to come. The self-portraits, with their synthetically modelled facial features, also herald the Pont-Aven period of 1888. The artist's aesthetic identity is already fully asserted in this early work.