Page from the Carnet Huyghe

This 228-page notebook, one of only six that have survived, offers an opportunity to explore Gauguin's creative process during his period in Arles. In addition to doodles, sketches, and finished studies for paintings, the notebook contains accounts and lists that offer us a valuable and richly varied insight into Gauguin's work and character. The drawings on the right-hand page are some of the studies in the notebook for the painting Old Women of Arles (Art Institute of Chicago). Gauguin creates studies of the women while experimenting with the background, revealing to us his method of analyzing and simplifying a problematic detail in pencil before transferring the element to the painting. In the sketches on the sheet, the artist studies the relationship between the figures in the foreground and those in the background. Although the finished painting varies somewhat from these sketches, its linear style and atmosphere are already discernible in these early versions.