About this work
At just 22 × 28.5 cm, *Nirvana* is a portrait of concentrated intensity. Jacob Meyer de Haan sits at the painting's center, his reddened, feverish features commanding the eye immediately, his chin resting on his hand in a posture that reads as deep, brooding thought.
He is rendered with something demonic in his bearing — clutching a golden snake shaped like the letter "G," while female nudes representing life and death stretch out behind him in the background, and the word "Nirvana" floats in the foreground, a pointed satirical nod to de Haan having achieved a kind of Buddhist oneness with the universe.
The medium — oil and tempera on silk — lends the surface an unusual luminosity, with Gauguin's flat planes of color and bold symbolic invention giving the small work a psychological scale far beyond its physical dimensions.
De Haan had traveled to Brittany in May 1889, where he befriended Gauguin in Pont-Aven, and the two moved together to Le Pouldu on the Breton coast for the winter of 1889–90.
De Haan was able to pay the living expenses in Le Pouldu and was also knowledgeable in the literary and philosophical matters that fascinated Gauguin.
Gauguin's portraits of de Haan attest to the friends' common interests as well as Gauguin's mixed feelings of admiration, gratitude, envy, and rivalry toward him. Those tangled emotions saturate *Nirvana*: there are several portraits of de Haan from the Le Pouldu period painted, drawn, or sculpted by Gauguin, showing the Dutch painter as obsessed by spirituality, preoccupied by his desire to learn, and almost satanic in his physical appearance.
What they came up with at Le Pouldu delved deeply into symbolism and early abstraction, stumbling way past the latent Impressionism they each sought to escape. *Nirvana* is among the most charged documents of that moment — a portrait that is equal parts homage and provocation, realized through Gauguin's embrace of oil on silk and the Post-Impressionist movement of the time.
This is a work for rooms that welcome intellectual weight — a study, a library, a reading corner lit by a single warm lamp. The image of de Haan — looking down pensively, his chin leaning on his hand, with large blue almond-shaped eyes and a shock of red hair — goes beyond personal caricature and becomes something more symbolic. It rewards slow looking
