Hello and welcome to Barnes Takeout, your daily serving of art. I'm Nancy Iason and I'm the Gunn Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation. Now I want you to join me today and pretend that you're in the Barnes Foundation, that you're in Room 7, which is a wonderfully rich room, and that we're going to look at a painting by Paul Gogan. And here we are in Room 7, we're looking at the wall with the Gogan on it. There are many other delights in this space, there's a wonderful painting right, Renoir in the centre of the room, there's a money just next to it to the left, and if you go one over still you'll get to this wonderful painting that Gogan made in 1890, and we're going to just zoom right in there and then focus in. So here we have the painting in question, it's by Gogan, a French artist, and it was made in 1890, so right at the end of the 19th century, and it's a boy called Louis Loury and it's called Muschululu, which is a nickname for the child, and actually if you just look in the corner of the painting, you can see that, Gogan signature, the PGO there, and 1890 the day the work was made, and a little inscription that says, Amishululu Souvenir, which means to to Mr Lulu, a memory or Souvenir, so what we see here is a painting that was made and we presume given to the child's parents, this wonderful portrait of a child was probably destined for Friends of Gogan, we know that the the Loury couple actually hosted Gogan at their home, so what we see here is perhaps a gift. But really, as well as being a portrait of a child, we see this picture as being a riot of color, you can sense that already when we were looking at it on the wall, there's this brilliant stretch of grain which really pulls our eye in, and it's counterbalanced by this deep orange in the top right hand corner, and the wonderful chair on which the child sits, which is rich in pinks and purples, there's a flower that forms part of the decoration of the fabric, but really springs out to become part of a still life in the background, you sense that these wonderful floral heads, the sort of scrolling of the leaves across the fabric, and some of that patination is also echoed in the way that the child is described, if you look at his clothing, those rich blues are tailored closely, and you have these wonderful scrolls of purple just delineating the cuffs, and Gogan's even gone in an outlined the sleeve there with touches of blue, and these heavy outlines really characterise the painting, this is a very distinctive facet of Gogan's work, and there isn't a sense of trying to create a realistic depiction of what a hand might look like or a sleeve might look like, these things are very evidently stylized, they become blocks of color that create an overall effect, and sometimes the style is called synthesis, and you really do get this kind of shorthand for colours and shapes going on, and I think you see that particularly well if you look at the hair of this child, there's a really thick black line that sets the child's profile off against the green background, if you see the way the curls of hair just echo across the white there, again very stylized, and the bangs with this blue shadow just casting a colour across his forehead. Now it's wonderful to focus in on the child's face because there's a real sensitivity to the way in which Gogan has described this child, there's a sense of personality there, of perhaps an interior world that this child might have, and that was something that was very particular to the 1800s, you know philosophers were starting to become interested in the interior life of the child, and so although this might be a portrait of a young boy, we also sense that there was something more worldly going on, and perhaps some of that comes out too in this dreamlike background, you sense that there is, you know this isn't a literal setting, even if we know that the landscapes of Lippeldo were you know strong in colour and you know there were wonderful flat fields and cliffs, and you could see the sea, none of that is described literally here, we instead have a sense of shapes and patterns, and we know from Gogan's letters that this was a very important moment in his career, he writes to his friend Van Gogh about really being having an insatiable appetite to do new things at this time, Gogan was staying at a place that was fairly remote, he'd been to to that region before, Brittany was popular with artists, but he wanted to get off the beaten track, and so he'd gone to stay with a woman called Marie-Onnie who ran an in there for artists, and there was a gathering of artists there, they could eat cheaply, they could eat well, and this was very important to Gogan because he wasn't while off at that time, he'd given up a professional stock-broken career, you know he'd given up a career in finance to be an artist, and he wasn't selling work very easily, and so he was reliant on hospitality, you know perhaps to the parents of this child, and also to Marie-Onnie for running this in, unfortunately we know that that story didn't end well, when he left the inn in November of 1890, he failed to pay his bills, and so some of his works were sold by the innkeeper really to try and recuperate her costs, that didn't always work out well for Gogan when he tried to save money, but let's not worry about the ins and outs of Gogan's politics at this precise moment, let's think instead of a wonderful picture of a child who's sitting very still, and perhaps if you have children of your own at this moment, you know, homeschooling, you're just hopeful that they're sitting as still and as quietly as this little boy, and again just to in case you were wondering the long hair and the clothing here wasn't unusual for a little boy at that time, it wasn't till later that that boy started to have their hair worn short or dressing more sort of masculine clothes, so really we have a sense of innocence here, a childlike portrait that perhaps all the same is veering into the world of adult forts and thelons, plenty to keep us occupied for sure, and until tomorrow, you know, please enjoy this picture, come back and see it when you do get to the barns, and keep tuning in for barns take out, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, and there'll be more to follow tomorrow. Thanks very much, bye bye.