Description
Matamoe (Landscape with Peacocks) – a working day, with two peacocks set in front of it
The picture stands upright and is full of incident, and yet the birds are what one notices first. In the lower left corner two peacocks walk across the green turf: the first blue-green, with a long tail trailing behind him, the second a pale pink and greyish. To their right lie dark pebbles and a red leaf. Only above the birds does the landscape open: a man with a blue cloth at his hips lifts an axe above his shoulder, and beside him a slender tree trunk rises. Behind him smoke climbs from a white mound; to the left stands a hut with a brown-pink roof, and near it two small figures, one in white, the other in red and blue. In the background rise an orange-red slope, a bluish mountain and a palm that bends over the upper edge. The work is held by the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow under the inventory number Zh-3369.
What stands in front and what behind
The arrangement is unusual. Everything that is work – the axe, the fire, the hut, the people – is pushed to the back and made small. The first place, where one would expect the main scene, goes to two ornamental birds that have nothing to do with the work. Gauguin has reversed the usual relation between the important and the incidental: the eye catches the plumage first and the working man only afterwards.
The man with the axe
The figure on the right is painted in a single movement: both arms raised, the axe behind his head, the body turned. This is not a pose held for the painter but the swing immediately before the blow. It is precisely this that keeps the scene from looking like a postcard despite the quiet landscape; somewhere inside it something is happening, even if it happens small and at the back.
The title in the yellow band
In the lower right corner a narrow yellow band is painted, and on it, in dark letters, the word Matamoe, with the signature and the year beside it. The museum record gives only this name, without explanation; what the Tahitian word means we do not assert here. In collections and books the work often appears as landscape with peacocks as well, and it is by the birds that it is most easily recognised.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every reproduction here is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. In this motif the blue peacock’s tail is the hardest part: it is built from tiny, precisely placed strokes, and if these run together the bird loses its weight in the foreground. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished work for approval.
- Subject: two peacocks on the grass, behind them a man with an axe, smoke, a hut and a mountain slope.
- Technique: oil on canvas, strong colour and a tall, upright crop.
- Sizes: portrait format, from 30 x 40 cm to 150 x 200 cm; 60 x 80 cm and 90 x 120 cm are often chosen.
- Of note: the ornamental birds stand at the front, while the work is moved to the back.
If the same period interests you, see also Arearea (Joyousness), There is the Temple (Parahi te marae) and Ia Orana Maria. The museum gives the measurement as height by width: 115 x 86 cm, a portrait format.
