The Call (1902): Art, History and Details

The Call (1902) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Painted on a remote island in Polynesia a year before the artist's death, The Call belongs to a series of late works that explore the mysteries of life and death. Two women stand with bare feet, as if on sacred ground. One woman gestures to someone outside the picture, perhaps responding to a "call" from fate or destiny. Gauguin realized his ambition of painting from memory and the imagination through such mysterious, dreamlike images.

Object facts

• Title: The Call
• Date: 1902
• Creator attribution: Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
• Culture: France, late 19th–early 20th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 160.5 x 119 x 9.5 cm (63 3/16 x 46 7/8 x 3 3/4 in.); Unframed: 131.3 x 89.5 cm (51 11/16 x 35 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1943.392

A detail from the museum

Although known as one of the founders of modern art, Gauguin found inspiration in ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian art. The woman with the pointing finger on the right side of this painting was taken from a figure on the Parthenon frieze.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Haberfeld, Hugo. "Die französischen Bilder der Sammlung Kohner." Der Cicerone 3 (1911): 579-589.
• Petrovics, Elek. "Báró Kohner Adolf Gyüjtémenye." Magyar Müvészet (Hungarian Art) 6 (1929): 300-322.
• "List of Paintings." Art Digest 8 (June 1, 1934): 12-24.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.