Title Page for "Le Sourire" (Titre du Sourire)

Title Page for "Le Sourire" (Titre du Sourire) by Paul Gauguin is a significant example of the artist’s graphic work, executed in 1899. This print, a demanding woodcut on delicate Japan paper, showcases Gauguin’s late-career experimentation with printmaking techniques. Created near the end of the pivotal period spanning 1876 to 1900, the work reflects the radical modernist transformation occurring within French art as artists moved away from Impressionism toward Symbolism.

Gauguin utilized the woodcut medium specifically for its primitive, rough quality, which aligned perfectly with his aesthetic interests and his ongoing search for non-Westernized forms of expression. As the title page for a periodical named Le Sourire (The Smile), the piece needed to serve both an editorial function and an artistic one, balancing stark symbolic imagery with clear textual elements. Gauguin’s distinctive approach involves highly flattened forms, simplified figures, and deep, contrasting black fields, demonstrating the Post-Impressionist tendency to emphasize two-dimensional design over naturalistic representation. The vigorous, sometimes crude lines inherent in the woodcut process lend the image a powerful, direct immediacy.

As a leading figure in the Symbolist movement, Gauguin frequently produced prints that disseminated his unique ideas and imagery outside the traditional painting market. This specific work is classified as a print and offers crucial insight into the artist’s commercial and editorial activities at the close of the 19th century. The piece is held in the comprehensive collection of the National Gallery of Art, where it serves as a touchstone for understanding the evolution of modern graphics. Like many important French prints from this era, high-resolution reproductions of this work are often available for scholarly study, sometimes falling within the public domain depending on institutional policy.