Self-Portrait
(Girl with a fan, 1902)
Gauguin painted several self-portraits
but the least known depicts
a Maori girl with a fan of feathers
balanced on her thigh.
She sits on a French carved wood chair
awkwardly, as if sitting were a balancing trick,
leaning her body to the left,
supporting her weight on her left arm,
gazing beyond an off-stage fire that lights her face
and the copper in her hair;
a Maori girl with a classical beauty
and a white Tahitian skirt, wound and tucked.
Only the support of her left hand
prevents her sliding off the canvas,
a departure that may have its appeal
to judge by the look of melancholy
on her finely balanced features.
Gauguin knew what she was seeing
for he had seen it himself.
The gap between us and the girl,
between her and Arcadia,
between Polynesia and France
is in the eye of a girl whose portrait enacts
Flaubertīs comment about his heroine.
Mike
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