Paul Gauguin – Three Tahitian Women

Paul Gauguin – Three Tahitian Women – hand-painted oil painting reproduction

Three women stand side by side against a broad yellow field; not one of them looks out at us. The canvas was painted in 1899 at Punaauia on Tahiti, oil on canvas, 73.5 × 68 cm, and is held by the Hermitage in St Petersburg; before that it hung on the Moscow wall of the collector Ivan Morozov. Here these three figures are made again under the brush: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, oil on canvas, with no printing. The museum gives the measurement as height by width: 68 × 73.5 cm. The work carries accession number ГЭ-7708.

The title names the background, not the event

The naming alone is unusual: the picture is called after its yellow background rather than after anything the women are doing. And indeed nothing happens – no scene, no story, no work being carried out. The yellow behind them is neither sky nor sand; it is an even, unbroken field of colour across which green bushes float as though cut out and laid on top. What Gauguin paints here is not a place but a decision: colour may be reason enough in itself.

Three who do not look

The figures are set in a row, almost as a frieze, and each of the three is turned inward. The left one bows her head, the middle one lowers her eyes, the right one presses a hand to her face and looks down. None of them meets our gaze. That is a quiet but deliberate act on the painter’s part: the viewer stands in front of the scene, not inside it. The colours of the wraps – violet, white, deep blue – are placed against the yellow so that each figure holds its own ground.

Punaauia, 1899

The painting was made at Punaauia, a village on the west coast of Tahiti where Gauguin was then living. The year 1899 is written on the canvas itself, beside the signature in the lower right corner. The work later travelled to Moscow, into the collection of Ivan Morozov, and from there to the Hermitage, where it hangs today. For a picture made on an island in the middle of the Pacific, that is an unusually short and unusually northern route.

A hand-painted reproduction for your home

The yellow and the near-square format are why this picture holds its own space even where a long horizontal canvas would not work. We paint it in eight sizes; 74 × 68 cm is the nearest to the original, while for a larger wall 110 × 100 cm is a frequent choice. From the same year of 1899 comes Maternity (Women on the Seashore) – three women again, but set into a space instead of against a colour; Arearea shows the same flat handling of colour, and Nevermore a Tahitian figure in an enclosed room.

• Subject: Three Tahitian Women, Paul Gauguin, 1899, Punaauia, Tahiti
• Technique: hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas – never printed
• Original: 73.5 × 68 cm, Hermitage, St Petersburg, formerly the Ivan Morozov collection
• Interesting fact: the picture is named after its background – the yellow field is its real subject