Volpini Suite

The Volpini Suite, created by Paul Gauguin in 1889, is a significant group of prints executed using the demanding medium of zincograph. This technique, essentially lithography utilizing a zinc plate instead of the traditional limestone, allowed Gauguin to reproduce images affordably and rapidly. Produced in France, these works mark a critical juncture in the artist's career, signaling his decisive shift away from Impressionism toward the developing Symbolist and Synthetist movements.

The creation of the suite coincided with the famous group exhibition organized by Gauguin and his peers at the Café Volpini during the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889. Excluded from the official Salon, this alternative exhibition provided a crucial platform for their nascent ideas. The zincographs featured daring stylistic elements, including flattened forms, bold outlines, and subject matter often drawn from rural Brittany or exoticized interpretations of non-Western cultures. Gauguin utilized this print series not merely to reproduce existing paintings but as a unique expressive format, reflecting his experiments with color simplification and stylized composition.

These influential prints demonstrate Gauguin's early exploration of primitivism and his developing mastery of graphic arts. Today, individual examples or collected sets from the Volpini Suite are housed in major institutions globally, including this impression held in the distinguished collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The historic nature of the zincograph medium and the age of the original publication mean that certain iterations of Gauguin’s 1889 output from France are increasingly available for study and reproduction through high-quality digitized public domain sources.