Description
Merahi metua no Tehamana – Gauguin’s portrait of Tehamana and her ancestors
In 1893 Paul Gauguin painted the portrait of Tehamana, his Tahitian companion, and titled it Merahi metua no Tehamana – Tehamana has many parents. The girl sits facing the viewer directly, in a blue-and-white striped mission dress with a white collar, a fan held in her hands. Behind her back a band of yellow signs runs the full width, and below it a deity and a smaller attendant figure appear. The work is held by the Art Institute of Chicago under accession number 1980.613. The format is portrait – the museum states height first and width second.
Who Tehamana is
Tehamana is not an unnamed model but a named person: the title of the work carries her name. Gauguin painted her in the dress the missionaries had brought to Tahiti, that is in a European cut, while the ground behind her is something else entirely – Tahitian, and older than the missions. It is precisely that contrast which carries the work: the girl sits between two worlds, dressed in one and surrounded by the other.
The signs behind her back
The band of yellow signs above her is not Tahitian writing. Gauguin took the forms from patterns he had seen elsewhere in Oceania and arranged them as a decorative frieze. They are painted as script but cannot be read – they work as a sign of the ancestors, not as text. Below them stands a dark female figure with raised arms, and beside her a smaller one; together they form a scene that belongs to belief, not to the mission school.
The lettering at the lower left edge
In the lower left corner the title MERAHI METUA NO TEHAMANA is painted in the colour itself, with the painter’s signature and the year beside it. It is his own brushstroke and part of the original work – not a watermark added afterwards, and not a publisher’s mark. On the reproduction it is painted just like the rest of the scene, because it belongs to the work.
The measurement: two sources differ
The measurements of this canvas differ between two records by 1.3 cm on each side. The Art Institute of Chicago records 75 x 53 cm; Wikidata records 76.3 x 54.3 cm. Everything else agrees in both entries: the year, the museum and the accession number. It makes no difference to choosing a format, because the ratio between the sides stays almost the same and a portrait work stays portrait. The support is jute, a coarse weave the painter also used for other works of those years.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
The reproduction is painted by hand, in oils on canvas, brushstroke by brushstroke. On this subject the face takes the greatest care: if that quiet, slightly withheld bearing is lost, the portrait becomes mere costume. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished piece for approval.
- Subject: Tehamana, named in the title, seated in a mission dress before the band of yellow signs and the figure of the deity.
- Technique: oil on jute, flat colour with a pronounced outline.
- Sizes: portrait format, from 35 x 50 cm to 140 x 200 cm; the most frequently chosen are 65 x 90 cm and 80 x 110 cm.
- Of note: the title is painted on the canvas itself, in the lower left corner, and carries the name of the girl portrayed.
If Gauguin’s other Tahitian portraits interest you, look also at Her Name Was Vairaumati, Spirit of the Dead Watching and Nevermore, where Gauguin likewise paints a single Tahitian woman in a space full of signs.
