Description
Paul Gauguin – Her Name was Vairaumati – hand-painted oil painting reproduction
In the Tahitian account Vairaumati is not the god’s daughter but his wife. That difference is what this picture is named for. The canvas was painted in 1892 on Tahiti, oil on canvas, 68 × 91 cm (width × height, an upright format), and it is held by the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow; before that it was in the collection of Sergei Shchukin. Here it is made again under the brush: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, oil on canvas, with no printing. The work carries accession number Ж-3266.
Oro is her husband, not her father
By tradition Vairaumati was the daughter of Ta’ata, the first man. The god Oro made a rainbow, crossed it down to earth and took her as his wife; she bore him a son, Hoa-tabu-i-te-ra’i, who became a great ruler, and the Arioi society traces its origin to that marriage. Father and husband are therefore two different figures, and Oro is the second of them. Confusing the two is an old error that runs through many descriptions of this painting – including the one we ourselves used to carry.
The title is painted on the canvas itself
Along the bottom centre, in the painter’s own hand, stands “Vaïraumati tei oa” – her name is Vairaumati. In the lower left corner are the signature Paul Gauguin, the year 92 and the word Tahiti. The title is not a museum label, then; it is part of the picture. The woman sits on a blue pareu patterned with white flowers, a dark carved idol rises behind her, and at her feet stands a white bird holding a lizard in its claws; what that scene means is not settled, and we will not announce it as fact.
The road to Moscow
The painting stayed first with the artist’s family, then passed to the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard. From him the Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin bought it in 1904. After the revolution it was nationalised in 1918 into the First Museum of New Western Painting, and since 1948 it has been in the Pushkin Museum. Twelve years, then, between a Tahitian canvas and a Moscow wall.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
The upright format and the deep blue of the pareu make this a picture for a narrow wall that people stand close to – beside a door, in an entrance hall, at the end of a corridor. We paint it in eight sizes; 68 × 91 cm is exactly the size of the original, while for a larger wall 90 × 120 cm is a frequent choice. From the same year of 1892 comes Spirit of the Dead Watching – Tahitian tradition again, but as fear rather than as genealogy; Arearea shows the same flat colour without a story, and Three Tahitian Women is the other picture of ours that reached Russia by the same route of private collections.
- Subject: Her Name was Vairaumati (Vaïraumati tei oa), Paul Gauguin, 1892, Tahiti
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas – never printed
- Original: oil on canvas, 68 × 91 cm, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, formerly the Sergei Shchukin collection
- Interesting fact: Oro is not Vairaumati’s father but her husband – her father is Ta’ata, the first man
