Two Tahitian Women

The offering picture

Painted in 1899, in the difficult final Tahitian years between Where Do We Come From and the move to the Marquesas, the canvas belongs to a group of late works in which the drama drains away and what remains is stillness — figures presented frontally, like carvings, holding offerings. The pose and tray deliberately echo classical relief and the fruit-bearers of older art; Gauguin was composing his Tahitian figures into the Western monumental tradition even as he claimed to have escaped it.[1]

The picture also cannot be separated from what it is: an idealized, sexualized image of Polynesian women composed by a French colonist for a European market, in the line of such images his whole Tahitian decade produced. The serenity is real and so is the machinery behind it. Museums now say both, and both belong here.

Reading the picture, detail by detail

The late manner rewards enlargement — the drama is gone and the paint is doing everything. Four details.

The two faces set the picture's chord. The woman on the left meets the light with level, frank stillness; her companion inclines her head, eyes lowered, a gold earring catching the shade. Neither invites nor refuses the viewer. The gravity that earlier Tahitian canvases assigned to gods and spirits has migrated, by 1899, entirely into human presence.[1]

The tray of blossoms is the picture's argument with art history: the offering pose of the Borobudur reliefs — the Javanese temple friezes Gauguin knew from photographs he owned — restaged on Tahiti as if it had originated there. One hand steadies the wood from beneath. The gesture is monumental and domestic at once, a caryatid carrying lunch.[1]

Her companion's flowers are not presented but kept — the spray of pink held close against the drape at her chest, half-enclosed by her fingers. If the tray is an offering made, this is an offering still being considered. The two hands, three inches apart in the composition, hold two different answers to the viewer.

The pale drape falls from shoulder to wrist in three long unbroken strokes against the deep blue of the skirt. Enlarged, the passage shows where the late Gauguin spent his attention: not on symbols or invented gods, but on the weight of cloth, laid in with a calm the early work never wanted.

More details

How it is painted

The late manner is quieter than the 1892 canvases: the color deeper and less strident, the contours softer, the modeling of the two figures fuller — almost sculptural against the flat green. The composition is a frieze of two, cropped close, with the tray's horizontal locking the design the way a plinth locks a statue.[1]

The golden-brown of the skin against saturated green and the pink of the dress carries the picture's warmth; the design does the rest with almost nothing.

Where it went

The canvas left the Pacific for the European market and passed through distinguished collections before William Church Osborn gave it to the Metropolitan Museum in 1949. Its monumental frontality — figures as carved presences — echoes through early modern figure painting, Picasso's classical periods included.[1]

It remains one of the most reproduced images of Gauguin's late Tahitian work, the calm counterpart to the big questions of the Boston canvas.