“Paul Gauguin's unique approach to art, evident in Still Life with Profile of Laval, was a process of constant searching and imaginative exploration. This painting is much more than a conventional still life of inanimate objects arranged on a table. Peering into the enigmatic space is the profile of his fellow painter Charles Laval, whom Gauguin met in the summer of 1886 in the quaint village of Pont-Aven, an artists' colony in northwestern France. Is the rectangle at the center a view to another space, or is it a reflection in a windowpane or mirror? Adding to the mystique of this composition is the strangely shaped vessel near its center. Gauguin had begun to make ceramics in 1886, and this object is one of the highly original results of his experiments."

Lee, Ellen Wardwell, Anne Robinson, and Alexandra Bonfante-Warren. Indianapolis Museum of Art: Highlights of the Collection. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2005, p. 120.

“After Gauguin returned to Paris from Pont-Aven in mid-October, he was further encouraged to branch out into nontraditional style and subjects when he began working for the ceramic designer Ernst Chaplet. Chaplet had studied the pottery of the Far East, as well as European folk styles, and reintroduced stoneware into contemporary ceramic production. He put Gauguin to work adapting the Brittany drawings to glazed paintings on stoneware vases. He also allowed Gauguin to experiment freely in making his own clay vessels, which, from the first, were both charming and grotesque. Freed from the conventions of sculpture that lay behind his earlier carvings in wood and stone, Gauguin squeezed, stroked, and cut the clay into organic shapes decorated with protruding figures, faces, knobs, straps, and handles. Although some are extremely beautiful in color and incised drawing, most are merely puzzling. One, which pleased him immediately, is now lost but can be seen in a painting of his young friend Charles Laval. The large, brown vessel has a human shape, the “chest” of which is fixed on this biomorphic form that permits so many organic interpretations. This pot was no doubt signed, like the others that Gauguin produced over the winter of 1886-87, with his proud new logo, PGo.

Nancy Mowll Mathews. Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001, p. 76.

“Gauguin remained unsure how to pursue in painting the direction he explored in his ceramics. His attempt to absorb and transcend the available alternatives provides the witty subtext of a remarkably strange picture that he executed after firing the ceramics. The mise-en-scène pays explicit homage to Cézanne: a table placed in the corner of a room with walls papered in a pattern reminiscent of the Provençal artist’s still lifes supports a rumpled cloth and a number of fruits modeled with firm contours and directional brushwork. The respectful mood is disrupted by two quite different intrusions: the strange object on the table that seems to face into the corner, and the head of a bespectacled young man, abruptly entering the pictorial space at the right. The position of the model—Charles Laval, a young painter whom Gauguin had befriended in Brittany—is indebted to Degas, who has used a similar compositional device in a pastel shown in the sixth Impressionist exhibition. Laval’s attention appears to be engaged not by the carefully positioned fruit, but by the oddly shaped ceramic object looming above it—one of the “monstrosities” of which Gauguin was particularly fond. Laval wears a quizzical expression, as if he is trying to make sense of what is before him.

The failure of pictorial elements to combine into a coherent whole in Still Life with Profile of Charles Laval is arguably the intention. Gauguin brought together two genres—still life and modern life—and their most prominent contemporary practitioners—Cézanne and Degas—but deliberately declined to resolve them. The ceramic, parachuted into this contested field, introduces a third personality—Gauguin—incarnated as an “authentic,” independent entity. Ironic and pointed, this was the first of a number of canvases thematizing the challenges of creativity. Through the figure of Laval, who acts as the viewer’s surrogate, Gauguin here seems to have invited us to speculate on his next move.”

Druick, Douglas W., and Peter Kort Zegers. Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South. Exh. cat. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001, pp. 69-70.

“This eccentric, off-centre portrait is Gauguin’s only painting of Laval. (But he drew him in his Brittany sketchbook of 1886; and there is a portrait drawing in the Tate Gallery, London, probably done in Martinique.) Internal evidence suggests that it must have been painted in Paris in the last weeks of 1886, rather than in Pont-Aven. For, as well as the still-life of fruit, Gauguin has included one of the ceramics that he only began making seriously after his return to Paris in October 1886. Gauguin put great faith in his ceramics, not only as objects that he hoped would win critical appreciation, but also as potential sources of much-needed income. Indeed, on his return from Martinique, Gauguin wrote to his wife Mette asking if she had taken this particular pot back to Copenhagen, adding a thumb-nail sketch of it and stressing that is [sic] was worth 100 francs (letter of 6 December 1887). So far, it has failed to turn up and may well be destroyed.

The fact that Gauguin has included it in this portrait, and his obvious concern for it in his letter to his wife, imply that he regarded it highly. And Laval is surely admiring it, caught in the act of paying homage to Gauguin the artist-creator of the still-life painting, maker of the pot as well as portraitist. In no other painting that includes one of his own pots does Gauguin involve the sitter do directly with the object.”

Brettell, Richard R., et al. Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven. London: Apollo, 1994, pp. 34-35.

Gauguin had already included works of art in his still lifes; here, for the first time, he presents one of his own works. Though the inclusion of this work makes the painting to some degree an artistic manifesto, it is also an homage to two masters: Cézanne and Degas. The general manner of the composition, with its outlined volumes and animated background, testifies to Gauguin’s admiration for Cézanne’s still lifes. And the audacious foreground framing of Laval’s profile derives from Degas, who had borrowed the effect principally from Japanese prints. Gauguin was now increasingly close to Degas, and seems deliberately to have associated his young colleague and friend Laval with this double homage and manifesto.”

Wildenstein, Daniel, et al. Gauguin: A Savage in the Making: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, 1873-1888. Milan: Skira, 2002, pp. 304-308.

Paul Gauguin's unique approach to art, evident in Still Life with Profile of Laval, was a process of constant searching and imaginative exploration. This painting is much more than a conventional still life of inanimate objects arranged on a table. Peering into the enigmatic space is the profile of his fellow painter Charles Laval, whom Gauguin met in the summer of 1886 in the quaint village of Pont-Aven, an artists' colony in northwestern France. Is the rectangle at the center a view to another space, or is it a reflection in a windowpane or mirror? Adding to the mystique of this composition is the strangely shaped vessel near its center. Gauguin had begun to make ceramics in 1886, and this object is one of the highly original results of his experiments.

Gauguin's bold ideas and charismatic personality made him the leading member of the international School of Pont-Aven. Criticized in their own time, today these artists are respected for liberating color from the constraints of naturalism and for emphasizing the decorative element in their work. The IMA is home to the nation's leading collection of paintings and prints by the School of Pont-Aven, acquired in 1998 from the collection of Samuel Josefowitz.

For most I will be a puzzle, for a few I will be a poet.
-Paul Gauguin, 1888