The Scottish artist Archibald Standish Hartrick (1864-1950), who studied and worked in Paris and Brittany in 1886-87, is one of the few artists who knew both Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and who recorded his memories of both in his autobiography, A Painter’s Pilgrimage through Fifty Years (1939). Hartrick met Gauguin in 1886, when both artists were lodging at the Pension Gloanec in Pont-Aven, by that time a popular artists’ colony.

This watercolour portrait of Gauguin is one of two that Hartrick made of the artist that were intended for the illustration of A Painter’s Pilgrimage; the other was purchased by the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts in 1944. Most likely done either from memory, from earlier sketches, or a combination thereof, it portrays Gauguin as Hartrick first encountered him in Pont-Aven: ‘Tall, dark, rather handsome, with a fine powerful figure, and about forty years of age, wearing a blue jersey, and a beret on the side of his head, is how I saw him first.’ Hartrick has posed him against the stretch of coast at Le Pouldu that forms the backdrop of Gauguin’s 1889 masterpiece The Green Christ (Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts), even incorporating from the painting the diminutive figure clad in blue walking away from the water’s edge with a rake slung over his shoulder. Although previously assumed that Hartrick painted his portrait of Gauguin in the 1930s, Martin Bailey has found evidence that it was done much earlier. In 1913 Hartrick wrote an essay on his Post-Impressionist friends for his wife, the artist Lily Blatherwick, and he illustrated it with portraits of Gauguin and Van Gogh. In an unpublished note Hartrick commented on his 1913 essay: ‘The portraits I drew for a copy I gave to my wife.’ He claimed that the images of Gauguin and Van Gogh he had done for Lily ‘give a truer idea of the general aspect of each of these painters’ than other depictions. Hartrick subsequently published the text of his essay as Post-Impressionism in 1916 (copies are now very rare and it is not even in the British Library’s collection).

Hartrick is known to have made a total of four such portrait drawings of French artists: besides the two of Gauguin are one each of Toulouse-Lautrec (London, Tate) and of Van Gogh (Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum), both of whom he befriended whilst studying at Fernand Cormon’s atelier in Paris. (The Tate’s catalogue entry for the Toulouse-Lautrec portrait mentions the existence of a sketchbook, formerly owned by Hartrick’s student Vincent Lines (1909-1968), as a possible source of sketches for these portraits.) The present work is the only one of Hartrick’s artist portraits not currently in a public collection. The portrait was only hitherto known through the black and white reproduction in Hartrick's memoir (facing p. 32, without the inscription), and the original presumed lost; it had been part of the estate of fellow artist, Charles Cundall (1890-1971), whose ownership of the drawing Hartrick mentioned in a 1944 letter to the director of the Royal Glasgow Institute.

The Scottish artist Archibald Standish Hartrick left London in 1886 to study art in France, where he mixed with many of the leading avant-garde painters. It is even possible that it was he who introduced Van Gogh and Gauguin to each other late that year, a suggestion put forward by the Toronto-based specialist Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov. During the summer of 1886 Hartrick worked in Pont-Aven, in Brittany, where Gauguin was a fellow lodger at the Pension Gloanec. This watercolour portrait is based on his impression of Gauguin: “Tall, dark, rather handsome, with a fine powerful figure, and about forty years of age, wearing a blue jersey, and a beret on the side of his head.” The inscription at the bottom of the portrait, which sets Gauguin against the coastal landscape of Brittany, reads: “Paul Gauguin then bathed at this spot - which he used as a background for Calvary” - a reference to Gauguin's Green Christ (Breton Calvary) (1889), a painting now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. Until recently it was assumed that Hartrick painted his portrait of Gauguin in the 1930s, but Martin Bailey has found evidence that it was done much earlier. In 1913 Hartrick wrote an essay on his Post-Impressionist friends for his wife, the artist Lily Blatherwick, and he illustrated it with portraits of Gauguin and Van Gogh. In an unpublished note Hartrick commented on his 1913 essay: “The portraits I drew for a copy I gave to my wife.” He claimed that the images of Gauguin and Van Gogh he had done for Lily “give a truer idea of the general aspect of each of these painters” than other depictions. Hartrick subsequently published the text of his essay as Post-Impressionism in 1916. The Gauguin portrait was later reproduced in black and white in Hartrick’s autobiography, A Painter’s Pilgrimage through Fifty Years (1939).

Acquired by the artist Charles Cundall RA (1890-1971), before 1944; by descent to his daughter Jackie Setter; Liss Llewellyn Fine Art (London), 2019; purchase there, 2020

From the Baroque to Today: New Acquisitions of Works on Paper, The Courtauld Gallery, London, 23/02/2024-27/05/2024

Inscription: backboard (removed), upper centre, brown ink (faded) : Paul Gauguin at Pouldu / A. S. Hartrick //

Inscription: backboard (removed), lower right, red pencil : 8 [in circle] //

Inscription: mount (removed), verso, upper left, graphite : 471/13 //

Inscription: recto, bottom edge, artist's hand : Paul Gauguin / Po / then bathed at this spot – which he used as a background for Calvaire / Now in Modern Gallery Bruxelles A.S.H.

Label: Hartwick frame with labels removed.