Soyez amoureuses, vous serez heureuses/ Love, And You Will Be Happy

The collection of wood blocks fashioned by Paul Gauguin comes from the posthumous estate of Milan Rastislav Štefánik, who discovered the portfolio during his travels to Polynesia in 1910. Wood−working was one of the ways in which Gauguin explored the world of the indigenous inhabitants of Oceania that was vanishing due to the influx of Western civilization. This art medium gave the artist new possibilities of expressing his sense of decoration oriented toward expressing a spiritual content, whose concept was often accompanied by script. Soyez amoureuses vous serez heureuses is one of the fourteen wood blocks dating from 1898–1899, whose impressions Gauguin sent to the art dealer Ambroise Vollard in Paris in 1900. This print’s subject matter is a reminiscence of the homonymous relief panel created during his Pont−Aven period (1889). The panel, the painting and the woodcut all have in common a crouched figure of an old woman as the key point of the fateful life parabola between birth and death, whose dramatic urgency Gauguin was intensively aware of in the final years of his life.