Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary)

A Christian scene in an invented Eden

Gauguin arrived in Tahiti in 1891 expecting an untouched pagan paradise; he found a French colony with sixty years of missionary Christianity. The painting records both truths without meaning to. Its subject is Christian because Tahiti's was; its treatment insists on paradise anyway, with fruit, flowers, and gold light. The Met identifies it as the first important canvas of the Tahitian years, and Gauguin himself thought well enough of it to describe it in detail in a letter the following spring.[1]

The sources are the pattern of everything he painted there. The two worshipping women take their pose from a photograph of the relief sculpture at Borobudur, the Buddhist temple in Java, that Gauguin carried in his luggage. A Christian subject, Javanese poses, Tahitian models, French paint: the Tahiti of his pictures was a deliberate hybrid, assembled from what he brought as much as from what he saw.[1]

Reading the picture, detail by detail

The first major Tahitian canvas rewards slow looking — nearly every passage carries one of Gauguin's imported sources wearing Tahitian dress.

The Madonna looks straight out of the picture — level, unstartled, entirely in possession of the scene — while the child rides her shoulder with his cheek laid against her hair. Their halos are two thin gold lines, worn as lightly as the flowers in their hair. European painting spent centuries making divinity heavy; here it weighs about as much as jewelry.

The two women greet mother and child with pressed palms — a gesture that never belonged to Tahiti. Gauguin lifted the pose directly from a photograph of the Borobudur temple reliefs in Java that he carried in his luggage. The devotion reads as genuine; the vocabulary is imported. That mixture is the method of the whole Tahitian decade, visible here at its first full strength.[1]

The angel barely attends its own Annunciation: purple-and-gold wings behind the flowering bush, face in profile among the leaves, one gesture directing the women's attention. Gauguin gives the supernatural messenger the smallest part in the scene — the vision belongs to the people having it, an idea he had been working since the Breton pictures.

At the Madonna's bare feet, the altar: a red bowl heaped with bananas on the pink path, signed P Gauguin 91 alongside. The offering in this Eden is lunch, presented with the same seriousness as the halos. Sacred and edible share one table, which is as good a summary of Gauguin's imagined Tahiti as the painting offers.

More details

How it is painted

The color is keyed higher than anything in his Brittany work — saturated reds and yellows against deep greens, the whole surface patterned like a textile. Contours stay heavy and depth stays shallow in the Synthetist manner, but the paint itself is denser and warmer, worked for the tropical light he had come to find.

The halos are gold leaf-flat, borrowed from the medieval and popular religious images he admired; the composition stacks its planes like a processional frieze. Decoration and devotion are given the same weight, which is the picture's real subject.

What it led to

Ia Orana Maria set the template for the Tahitian decade: sacred subject matter — Christian or invented-Polynesian — carried by flat pattern and non-natural color, with figures assembled from the photographic file he traveled with. The canvases that followed it, from Manao tupapau to Where Do We Come From, elaborate the machinery first assembled here.

It entered the Metropolitan Museum with the bequest of Sam A. Lewisohn in 1951 and remains the museum's cornerstone Gauguin.[1]