A specialist from the Museu d'Orsay in Paris has confirmed that the drawing in the Faro Municipal Museum thought to be by Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) is genuine, and it will be put on display again in May. The director of the Faro Municipal Museum told the Lusa agency that it is a charcoal drawing 24.8 centimetres high and 29.5 centimetres wide.

The specialist from the Museu D'Orsay, where some of the most important works of the Impressionist movement are kept, had studied the work and concluded that the drawing is an 1875 original, signed by Gauguin.

The drawing, whose subject is a baby thought to be Paul Gauguin’s first child, has been in Faro since 1944, when the diplomat Amadeu Ferreira d'Almeida donated his art collection to the Faro Council.

Dália Paulo said that it is an early Gauguin, but that a detailed study of the work had yet to be done. She said that all the paintings, drawings and engravings from the Ferreira d'Almeida collection are to be assessed by specialists by the end of the year.

The director of the museum said that further proof of the work’s authenticity is that it was framed in gilded wood in Copenhagen, where Gauguin’s wife was from.

The charcoal drawing, which was on display at the Faro Municipal Museum until 1998, will go on show again in May when it will be the “work of the month”, an initiative of the Faro museum.

Gauguin was born in Paris and spent the first seven years of his life in Peru, returning to France in 1855; he studied in Orléans before joining the merchant navy and travelling the world.

He married a Danish woman, had five children and it was only when he was 35 that he devoted himself exclusively to painting; he was one of the outstanding figures of 20th century art especially for his pictures of native women of Tahiti and revealing the natural eroticism of the island environment.

Another piece from the Ferreira d'Almeida collection is on display at the Faro Municipal Museum until the end of this month.

It is an Indo-Portuguese sculpture in miniature (78 millimetres by 38), from the first half of the 17th century representing the Virgin in Majesty seated on a cathedra, with the unclothed baby Jesus on her lap with the world in his left hand.

The Ferreira d'Almeida collection was donated by Amadeu Ferreira d' Almeida (1876-1966), who was from Faro, and it comprises 1,200 items, including a fake Rembrandt.

source: algarve observer