May 6th. This grandiose event lasted six months. During this time the exhibit “brought together some 60,000 exhibitors and attracted over 28 million visitors.” (Merlhs, 81) The esplanade of the “Invalides” was devoted to various pavilions, but principally to the Colonial Exhibition. The Egyptian sector of the exposition featured many panoramas from industrial life in Egypt some 5,000 years before. The scenes at the showing were derived from the Khnoumhospou tomb at Beni-Hassan. Many of the vistas depicted workers in the fields in the form of a register. Egyptian registers were comprised of a group of people working or carrying on in the form of a line. All subjects in a register stood next to each other, with no feeling of depth. Registers could comprise an entire piece of art, or could just be a part of the whole illustration. The Egyptian studio also demonstrated the spinning and weaving in ancient Egypt. On one of the walls present in the studio, two men were portrayed working leaning towards one another. The men were represented in perfect symmetry complimenting one another. In the scene from Beni-Hassan, much double symmetry, both vertical and horizontal, is apparent. This symmetry, so frequent in the art of ancient Egypt, is later found in the works of artists such as Meyer de Haan, and Gauguin. The Colonial Exhibition would have a lasting impression on Gauguin’s art. Beginning in 1889, after his appearance at the exhibition, Gauguin manifested for primitive painters and for Japanese and Egyptian art. After his exposure to the art of other ethnicities, changes in Gauguin’s work began to appear. Like Egyptian artists, he outlined his shapes and even used Egyptian poses in several of his paintings. In Gauguin’s work Harvest Brittany (1889), these aspects are clearly visible. In The Day of the God, a young native mother and her two children are near the water while an immense image of a go...
