Interpretive Resource
Introduction: Gauguin's Portrayal of Tehamana
An introduction to the enigmatic portrait of Gauguin's young companion, completed during the artist's first sojurn to the French colony of Tahiti.
Art Institute of Chicago. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in The Art Institute of Chicago. Art Institute of Chicago, 2000, p. 146.
Paul Gauguin French; 1848—1903
Ancestors of Tehamana (Merahi Metna No
Tehamana), 1893
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Deering
McCormick, 1980.613
Paul Gauguin’s restless search for a life of "ecstasy, calm, and art" took him twice to the French colony of Tahiti. During his first sojourn (June 1891—June 1893), he confronted the fact that the idyllic paradise he had imagined did not exist. Nevertheless, he searched for it in his art. The resulting works— based on the artist’s quasi-ethnographic "documents," or drawings of local people and motifs, and on various books, prints, and photographs he had brought with him—are rich amalgams of European and Oceanic forms. Radiant portrayals of a tropical paradise, they are also poignant essays on the discrepancy, in an age of imperialism, between exoticist fantasy and indigenous reality.
This portrait depicts Tehamana, Gauguin's young companion during much of this period, wearing a high-collared, "Mother Hubbard" dress of the sort imposed by missionaries on the local population. Her clothing is an obvious reference the pervasiveness of European influence, but her plaited fan, regal bearing, and elusive smile suggest Gauguin’s desire for access to something more profound. Fascinated by Tahiti’s mythic past but unable to find it in the present, Gauguin represented his sitter’s "ancestry" with a variety of symbols. The painting’s background consists of an assortment of enigmatic imagery, arrayed over three superimposed levels. At the bottom are two ripe mangoes, an allusion to the island’s bounty and possibly to female fertility. In the middle section, the full-length figure of the local deity Hina, moon goddess and mother of the world, appears in a painted relief. The uppermost zone features two rows of yellow glyphs, inspired by tablets discovered in 1864 at Easter Island whose inscriptions—the only known traces of written language in Polynesia—remained undecipherable. Gauguin’s analogous signs evoke both the richness and the ultimate inscrutability, to the European mind, of Tehamana’s cultural heritage.
