Tahitian Faces (Frontal View and Profiles)

Paul Gauguin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gauguin made this powerful drawing during his second trip to Tahiti. Among the most impressive of Gauguin’s surviving drawings, it is likely a preparatory study for the figure on the left in his 1899 painting Two Tahitian Women (49.58.1). The drawing has a strong sculptural effect due to both the masklike appearance of the blank eye sockets and the artist’s use of the stumping technique, in which he smudged the charcoal contour lines to model the head.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art