Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Tahitian Women on the Beach, Paul Gauguin, 1891. Oil on canvas, 69 × 91 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Musée d'Orsay, Paris replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Post-Impressionism
Tahitian Women on the Beach
Paul Gauguin · 1891
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 69 × 91 cm
- Held by
- Musée d'Orsay, Paris
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
- Country
- French Polynesia
The painter
Paul Gauguin
Gauguin was a successful Paris stockbroker who collected Impressionist paintings before he made any, and who gave up the career at thirty-five to paint full-time — leaving a wife and five children in Copenhagen in the process. The work that matters begins in Brittany, where from 1886 he developed with Émile Bernard a way of painting in flat areas of unmodulated colour bounded by heavy contours, borrowed in part from cloisonné enamel and Japanese prints. He spent nine weeks living with Van Gogh in Arles in 1888, which ended badly and permanently.
Nearby
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The Potato Eaters
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Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
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What to look at
Painted in Gauguin's first months in Tahiti, and it is worth being plain about the circumstances: he arrived as a Frenchman in a French colony, looking for an "untouched" culture that colonisation had already substantially dismantled, and he painted its people as the subject of that search. The woman on the right wears a missionary-introduced cotton dress — the thing he claimed to have come to escape — and the woman on the left wears a pareu. That contradiction is sitting in the picture whether or not he intended it. As a painting it is built on two solid pyramidal figures placed against horizontal bands of pink sand, green-grey sea and a strip of sky, with almost no depth between them. The handling is drier and flatter than his Breton work. He has stopped outlining everything in black and started letting a colour boundary do the separating on its own.