Old Women of Arles, from the Volpini Suite: Dessins lithographiques

Old Women of Arles, from the Volpini Suite: Dessins lithographiques

Paul Gauguin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

On the fairgrounds of the Paris World's Fair of 1889, at Volpini's Café des Arts, Gauguin exhibited a brand new suite of ten zincographs printed on bright yellow paper. Known as the "Volpini Suite," the prints served as a pictorial souvenir of Gauguin's recent travels in Brittany, Martinique, and Arles. This print depicts four elderly women walking on a wintry garden path. The bare landscape is punctuated by a large round shrub, a graceful willow, and two tall wrapped trees. The pair in the foreground, one of whom resembles Mme Ginoux, the owner of a famous café in Arles, shield themselves against the cold winds of the mistral with their cloaks. Gauguin found great satisfaction in the appearance of the women he encountered while in the south of France, and rhapsodized about them in a letter: "The women here, with their elegant coiffure, their Grecian beauty, their shawls falling in folds like the primitives, are, I say, like Greek processions." The brightly colored paper Gauguin used in the Volpini Suite is reminiscent of Van Gogh's Yellow House in Arles, where Gauguin had a disastrous stay as Van Gogh's guest in 1888.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Old Women of Arles, from the Volpini Suite: Dessins lithographiquesOld Women of Arles, from the Volpini Suite: Dessins lithographiquesOld Women of Arles, from the Volpini Suite: Dessins lithographiquesOld Women of Arles, from the Volpini Suite: Dessins lithographiquesOld Women of Arles, from the Volpini Suite: Dessins lithographiques

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.