page_title: Spirit of the Dead Watching
section_title: Relation to Édouard Manet's Olympia
hierarchical_section_title: Spirit of the Dead Watching / Relation to Édouard Manet's Olympia
caption_attribution_description: English: Paul Gauguin - Copy of Manet's Olympia
context_page_description: Spirit of the Dead Watching is an 1892 oil on burlap canvas painting by Paul Gauguin, depicting a naked Tahitian girl lying on her stomach. An old woman is seated behind her. Gauguin said the title may refer to either the girl imagining the ghost, or the ghost imagining her.
context_section_description: Gauguin was an admirer of  Édouard Manet's 1863 Olympia. He had seen it exhibited at the 1889 Exposition Universelle and commented in a review, "La Belle Olympia, who once caused such a scandal, is esconced there like the pretty woman she is, and draws not a few appreciative glances". After the French state purchased Olympia from Manet's widow, with funds from a public subscription organised by Claude Monet, Gauguin took the opportunity to make a three-quarter size copy when it was exhibited in the Musée du Luxembourg. The copy is not an especially faithful one and it is thought he completed it from a photograph. Edgar Degas later purchased it for 230 francs at Gauguin's 1895 auction of his paintings to raise funds for his return to Tahiti. It is known that Gauguin took a photograph of Manet's Olympia with him on his first visit to Tahiti. Claire Frèches-Thory remarks that Olympia, the modern equivalent of Titian's Venus of Urbino, is a constant presence in Gauguin's great nudes of the South Pacific: Spirit of the Dead Watching, Te arii vahine, and Nevermore.
  When Gauguin exhibited Spirit of the Dead Watching at his largely unsuccessful 1893 Durand-Ruel exhibition (in particular he failed to sell Spirit at the elevated 3,000 francs he had set for it), several critics noted the compositional similarities with Olympia. Thadée Natanson, a founder of La Revue Blanche,  called it the "Olympia of Tahiti", while Alfred Jarry, more pointedly, dubbed it "the brown Olympia".
caption: Copy of Manet's Olympia, 1891.
exif: {"Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "600", "Thumbnail YResolution": "600", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "108", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3999"}