Description
Ta matete (The Market) – five figures in a row on a single bench
In 1892, during his first stay on Tahiti, Paul Gauguin painted five women seated in a row on a long green bench. Each is shown in profile or nearly so, and several hold a flat fan in front of them. The dresses are dark green, dark green with a white collar, pale grey-lilac, bright red and light yellow. At the right edge stands another figure in a red-and-yellow patterned cloth, cut off by the edge of the canvas. Behind them rise bluish trunks and dark foliage, and at the upper right, along a blue band of water, two small figures can be seen. In the foreground run a green and an orange band of ground. The work is held by the Kunstmuseum Basel under inventory number 1849. The format is landscape – the museum states height first and width second.
A row, not a scene
The figures do not form a group but a row. They sit side by side on the same bench, at the same height, each turned in her own direction, and none looks towards her neighbour. Gauguin arranged them as a frieze: evenly, flatly, without the depth that would bind them into a conversation. That is why the work reads more as a sequence of signs than as a market scene, although the title says exactly that.
What they hold
Almost every one of the seated women raises a pale flat fan in front of her. Those white shapes repeat along the row and give the work its beat: the eye reads them one after another, as if counting time. Without them the row would be only a succession of coloured dresses; with them it becomes an ordered composition.
The measurement: two records differ
This is worth stating plainly. The Kunstmuseum Basel gives 73.2 x 91.5 cm; the public art database gives 73 x 92 cm. The year, the museum and the inventory number agree; only the measurements differ. The museum’s figure governs here, but we print both. It makes no difference to choosing a size, because the ratio between the sides stays almost the same and a landscape work stays landscape. The support is jute, the coarse weave the painter often used in those years.
The inscription and the signature on the canvas
The museum record states that the work is signed and dated at the lower right P Gauguin 92, and inscribed at the lower left TA MATETE. Both are visible on the work itself, painted in blue. It is the painter’s own stroke and part of the original work, not a mark added afterwards.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every piece here is painted by hand, in oils on canvas, brushstroke by brushstroke. On this subject the beat of the row is the hardest part: if the intervals between the figures go wrong, the frieze falls apart and the work loses its quiet order. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished piece for approval.
- Subject: five women in a row on a green bench, each in profile, with pale fans held before them.
- Technique: oil on a coarse weave, flat colour and firm outlines.
- Sizes: landscape format, from 40 x 32 cm to 200 x 160 cm; the most frequently chosen are 80 x 64 cm and 100 x 80 cm.
- Of note: the title means the market, yet no trading appears in the work – only the row of seated figures remains.
If the same period interests you, look also at Mahana no atua (Day of the God), Te arii vahine (The King’s Wife) and Fatata te Miti (By the Sea), where Gauguin likewise builds the work out of flat fields of colour.
