© NCG Signature/Inscription: Signed lower centre: à Md. Gloanec P. Gauguin 1894. Lower left: Arearea no varua ino Place of Origin: -- Type of work: Painting Glossary of technical terms: see Dictionary MIN 1832 Gauguin, Paul 1848-1903 Reclining Tahitian Women 1894 Oil on canvas, 60 x 98 cm Gauguin left France in 1891 in search of a society untouched by western civilisation. He arrived in Tahiti where he was to pass two periods of time, 1891-4 and 1896-1901 (see cat. 200). Gauguin was drawn to the beauty of Tahitian women. Often placed in non-natural or dream landscapes, they came to represent the ideal woman untainted by fashion or artifice, set within an evocation of nature in its unsullied form or within landscapes that hold in their detail an extended symbolic meaning. Here the composition has been divided by a diagonally placed tree trunk, which separates the two women from a secondary plane populated by unworldly figures: to the left sits a statue of the goddess of life, Hina, and in the upper carton is a blue mask of what might be a symbol of death. Beyond, two figures are fighting or dancing. Given the presence of the two red fruits placed between the women in the foreground, possibly a symbol of temptation, the meaning of the painting may lie in a struggle between life and death, in which the inscription, translated loosely as ‘the amusement of the evil spirit’, suggests that temptation lies in waiting to convey the women either towards death, or, if shunned, towards eternal life. Gauguin regularly attached Tahitian phrases to his paintings. Since he was untutored in Tahitian, they tend to be hybrids from anthropological texts or his own personal interpretation. In addition, given that the Tahitian religion and its imagery had been virtually eradicated by French Catholic missionaries, the appending of such texts reinforced the archaic, primitivising meaning of the work. TB-M Location: Room 65 Enlarged Photo Provenance NCG Catalogue references Exhibition History Shop   Luk