Brief Report
This paint with its view of the industrial buildings on the banks of the Seine is one of Gauguin's early works [Wildenstein 1964, cat. no. 15, Wildenstein 2001, cat. no. 18]. In 1875, when The Seine at the Pont de Grenelle was painted, Gauguin was still working as a stockbroker. He was to pursue painting as a sideline for another seven years, before finally deciding in 1882 to turn his back on the world of finance. This picture is one of the few that Gauguin painted on wood. He used a commercially prepared mahogany panel (Fr. acajou), which evidently came pre-primed with its off-white ground (fig. 8). A stencil verso indicates the panel to be a product of the Latouche company, although the format does not match any of the known standard sizes (figs 2, 4). However there is nothing to suggest that Gauguin cropped a panel that was originally of such a format. Before starting the actual painting, Gauguin established a perspective vanishing-point structure in the region of the buildings, apparently with a pencil and ruler. This can be seen clearly in the IR reflectogram, while microscopic inspection reveals no obvious clues to the precise nature of the medium (fig. 9). The drawing was followed by very thin, semi-transparent underpaintings (Fr. ébauche) in parts of the picture, with intensive, coarsely pigmented red ochre and greenish brown (fig. 10). The remaining painting was executed briskly wetin- wet, including the signature. In this process, individual paints blended only when applied to the panel itself, e.g. in the bow of the barge in the foreground. The brushwork is easy to follow, but hardly impasto, the pale ground serving time and again as a reflector thanks to the thinness of the paint. It takes microscopic enlargement to discern the use of red lake. Individual paint applications which come across as green, brown or black originally included clear red accents. In the fine cracks of these applications, which under the microscope look as if they have been broken open, can be seen what was once a raspberry-red lake, but is now a whitish, powdery, in some places foamylooking substance (fig. 12). The particular kind of lake has not been identified beyond doubt, but the most recent investigations of van Gogh's and Guillaumin's paintings suggest that the addition of starch alongside the oily binding medium was responsible for pronounced bleaching and structural changes in the paint layers involved [Bommel/ Geldorf/Hendriks 2005, Burnstock/ Lanfear/ Berg, 2005]. There are incidentally two further works depicting the same motif in a similar format and also on wood; one unsigned study with an identical scene but far more sketchy in character, titled Le Port de Grenelle - I [Wildenstein 2001, cat. no. 17] and a detail of the motif titled Les Usines Cail et le Quai de Grenelle [Wildenstein 2001, cat.no. 16].
Paul Gauguin
The Seine at the Pont de Grenelle, 1875, oil on mahagony, 30.6 x 45.7 cm, WRM Dep. FC 744
Paul Gauguin
born on 7 June 1848 in Paris,
died on 8 May 1903 in Atuona on the Marquesas Islands
Fig. 02
Verso with barely legible dealer’s stamp (cf. fig. 4)
Fig. 03
UV fluorescence
Fig. 04
Details, dealer’s stamp of the Latouche company in incident light and under UV (bottom)
Fig. 05
Details, signature applied wet-in-wet under incident light and UV, top left microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)
Fig. 06
Details, traces of manufacture of panel verso, in raking light (top), below, traces of a fastening (arrow)
Fig. 07
Detail, raking light, beneath the intact paint and ground layers a dent in the panel is discernible
Fig. 08
Off-white ground of the panel along the bottom edge where paint has been lost, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)
Fig. 09
Constructional underdrawing lines are discernible in the
IR reflectogram, but they only rarely appear through the paint-layer, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)
Fig. 10
A thin coloured underpainting (Fr. ébauche) is visible in
those places where the top paint layer has no been applied,
microscopic photograph, (M = 1 mm)
Fig. 11
Wet-in-wet paint applications at the transition from the row
of houses to the sky, applied successively, and rounded off by even smaller accents, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)
Fig. 12
Mapping and microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm) testify to
changes in the paintlayers which contained red lakes