Description
Two Tahitian Women – Gauguin’s late Tahitian pair with mango blossoms
In 1899, in his last Tahitian years and shortly before he left for the Marquesas, Paul Gauguin painted two women placed side by side and cut off above the knee. One holds a shallow dish of red mango blossoms; the other carries them at her shoulder. Behind them there is no landscape but a dense green wall of foliage flecked with yellow blossom. The work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York under accession number 49.58.1. The format is portrait – the museum states height first and width second, so 94 x 72.4 cm.
Two figures, not a scene
Nothing happens on this canvas. There is no story, no ritual, no movement – only two figures standing close to the viewer and filling almost the whole surface. Gauguin painted them like sculpture: the outlines are quiet and rounded, the bodies modelled in broad planes rather than in small strokes. That is exactly why the work reads as a monument rather than as a scene.
The mango blossoms
The red blossoms in the dish are the only strong warm accent in the whole painting. They sit low and near the centre, breaking the green and yellow ground. They are not ornament: the entire colour balance rests on them, and if they lose their intensity the work turns lukewarm. In a hand-painted oil reproduction that passage is therefore painted last, once the relations between the other colours are already settled.
Where the original is, and what the sources say
The original is at the Metropolitan, accession number 49.58.1, dated 1899, oil on canvas. Here the two publicly available records – the museum’s and the encyclopaedic one – agree to the decimal, the measurement of 94 x 72.4 cm included. That is not a given: for some of Gauguin’s works the figures diverge, and for this one they do not.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
The reproduction is painted by hand, in oils on canvas, brushstroke by brushstroke. On this subject the two faces are the hardest part: they are not portraits of particular people, yet they have to keep that quiet, slightly absent expression, or the pair becomes mere decoration. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished piece for approval.
- Subject: two Tahitian women at half length, one with a dish of red mango blossoms, before a wall of foliage.
- Technique: oil on canvas, quiet outlines and broad planes of colour.
- Sizes: portrait format, from 30 x 40 cm to 150 x 200 cm; the most frequently chosen are 60 x 80 cm and 75 x 100 cm.
- Of note: this is not the same work as the Three Tahitian Women in the Hermitage – a different work, a different museum and a different accession number.
If the same period interests you, look also at Three Tahitian Women, Woman Holding a Fruit; Where Are You Going? and Her Name was Vairaumati, where Gauguin likewise sets a Tahitian figure directly in front of the viewer.
