Volpini Suite: Design for a Plate: Leda and the Swan (Projet d'Assiette: Léda et le Cygne)

Volpini Suite: Design for a Plate: Leda and the Swan (Projet d'Assiette: Léda et le Cygne) is an important zincograph created by Paul Gauguin in 1889. This print belongs to the celebrated Volpini Suite, a group of eleven prints Gauguin produced immediately following his return from Arles and displayed publicly at the Café Volpini during the Paris Exposition Universelle that summer. The suite represents a critical transitional moment in the artist's career, showcasing his move away from Impressionism toward the decorative and symbolic forms that would define his later work.

As a print, the zincograph technique provided Gauguin a way to achieve sharp lines and graphic clarity, disseminating his new aesthetic principles to a wider audience. The composition is explicitly formatted as a circular Design for a Plate, emphasizing its function as a decorative object rather than a traditional narrative scene.

The subject matter reinterprets the classical myth of Leda and the Swan. Gauguin renders the mythological figures with a sense of stylized flatness and simplification, characteristics that align him firmly within the burgeoning Symbolist movement in France at the time. Unlike academic treatments, Gauguin’s approach prioritizes pattern and line, anticipating the cloisonnism he had been developing.

This early work is instrumental in tracing Gauguin’s development of Symbolist graphic arts. Though often recognized for his achievements in painting, his prints from this period reveal his consistent desire to elevate folk and mythological subjects into a unified, decorative system. The work is preserved in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.