44. Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903). Still Life with Apples, a Pear, and a Ceramic Portrait Jug, 1889. Oil on paper mounted on panel, 11 ⼀攀 × 14 ⼀攀 in. (28.6 × 36.2 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge; Gift of Walter E. Sachs, 1958 (1958.292) plex ideas about ancient history, the subjugation of Indian populations, and Peruvian national identity (see inside 42 front cover). Within what we think of as the European avant- garde, the French artist Paul Gauguin explored issues of personal identity in a number of ceramic works and paintings. Born in Paris, Gauguin spent part of his child- hood in Peru, where his mother, Alina María Chazal, had 43 family. Chazal was an admirer and collector of ancient Peruvian ceramics, which were considered “barbaric” by other French colonists. Gauguin, like his mother, prized the power of these works, seeing in them great strength and freedom, and on occasion referred to himself as an “Inca,” establishing a dialectic between his constructed identity as a non-European “other”—in this case, meaning a well spring of primal power and creativity rooted in his 44 Peruvian ancestry—and as a Parisian art-world insider. His Still Life with Apples, a Pear, and a Ceramic Portrait Jug features what is unmistakably a seated Moche-style vessel, a sentinel, perhaps as a stand-in for Gauguin himself, in homage to the painter Paul Cézanne (昀椀g. 44).45 Gauguin’s assertion of his Inca heritage was further underscored by a ceramic self-portrait of the same year (昀椀g. 45). There is no question but that these references 45. Gauguin, Pot in the Shape of a Head (Self-Portrait), 1889. Stoneware, H. 7 11/16 in. (19.5 cm). Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen were conscious and intentional. 45