Interpretive Resource

Paul Gauguin arrived in Tahiti in June 1891. Tahiti had been discovered by Europeans more than a century before and was, by 1891, resolutely colonial. Gauguin’s aims in traveling to Tahiti were financial and spiritual (he imagined that he could live for almost nothing in a pre-capitalistic society, and he thought that this truly primitive place would be a paradise). He was disappointed on both counts and fled Tahiti for France after a period of about two years.

If his life was more problematic than he had expected, the art he created in the South Pacific fails to reflect that difficulty. The paintings, drawings, watercolors, prints, and texts he produced in Tahiti present an image of an intoxicating earthly paradise where the painter lived as a native among the natives. Ancestors of Tehamana is a portrait of Gauguin’s young Tahitian wife, Tehura. Although the most famous paintings and writings about the beautiful Tehura describe her in the nude and involve either images of sleep or of lovemaking, this is definitely a portrait and recalls in many ways his Portrait of a Seated Woman. In each work, Gauguin placed his model in a seated position in front of a painting. In each, the woman is carefully dressed without a hint of sexual provocation, and fruit is included.

Gauguin depicted Tehura against a painted wall decoration divided into two major sections. The striped dress, flower-decorated hair, and contained pose of Tehura contrast with the stylized gesture of the female figurine behind her. Yet, surely Gauguin was implying a strong, if silent, bond between these two figures. Their strictly frontal posture, the profiled heads behind either shoulder of Tehura, the direction in which her Tahitian fan is pointed, and even the way in which she glances to the left all reinforce the connection suggested here between the present and the past, the living and the dead, the corporeal and the spiritual.

What is ultimately so mysterious and fascinating about this work is its painted background. It resembles a frieze on the wall of a palace or temple interior. The writing in the upper portion of the frieze is unintelligible: Is it some form of Polynesian epigraphy? Is it a sacred text? Was it written by the ancestors of Tehamana? Are the painted figures in the next rung of the frieze representations of these ancestors? The wall decoration ends at the lower boundary of the painting with two mysterious fruits. Too large to be oranges, too orange to be apples, too flat to be real, these fruits allude to the art of Paul Cezanne. While Cezanne worked in isolation in the south of France, rarely, if ever thinking of Gauguin, Gauguin worked in isolation in Tahiti with the work of Cezanne constantly on his mind.