Description
Paul Gauguin – Woman Holding a Fruit; Where Are You Going? – hand-painted oil painting reproduction
The title is not a question about the meaning of life. It is a greeting. The canvas was painted in 1893 on Tahiti, oil on canvas, 92.5 × 73.5 cm (height × width, so an upright format), and since 1948 it has been held by the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Here the scene is made again under the brush: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, oil on canvas, with no printing. The work carries accession number ГЭ-9120.
An everyday greeting raised to a title
The Swedish anthropologist Bengt Danielsson, a Gauguin specialist, read the Tahitian phrase “Eu haere ia oe” as the island’s ordinary greeting – roughly the everyday “where are you off to?”. That is his reading and we give it as a reading rather than as fact. If it holds, the sense of the picture turns over: the women behind her are not asking about her fate but about her errand, and the painting catches a moment of passing rather than a prophecy.
A fruit that may not be a fruit
She carries a large pale green object, supporting it with one hand and holding it by the stem with the other. Our title calls it a fruit, as most English titles do. The French record of the painting instead describes it as a hollowed-out gourd, probably filled with water – and hedges itself with that “probably”. Both readings exist, neither is settled, and we present them that way. What is certain is the shape: heavy, pear-like, and big enough to need two hands.
From Vollard to the Hermitage
The painting was first with the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard, and from him it passed to the Moscow collector Ivan Morozov. After the Russian private collections were nationalised it moved between Moscow museums and in 1948 came to rest in the Hermitage, where it remains. In the foreground stands a woman with a white flower behind her ear and a red-and-yellow pareu; behind her, beside a hut with a pink roof, two figures crouch, and at the far right a third stands holding a child.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
The hot yellow of the body against the blue sky and the red pareu makes this a picture for a room that can carry strong colour – a living room, a dining room, the wall behind a table. The original measures 92.5 × 73.5 cm; we paint it in eight sizes, chosen in the selector above this text. From the same Tahitian years comes Spirit of the Dead Watching – the same period, but fear instead of a greeting; Arearea shows the same flat handling of colour without a story, and Her Name was Vairaumati is the other picture of ours that reached Russia by the same route of private collections.
- Subject: Eu haere ia oe – Woman Holding a Fruit, Paul Gauguin, 1893, Tahiti
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas – never printed
- Original: oil on canvas, 92.5 × 73.5 cm, the Hermitage, St Petersburg, since 1948; formerly the Ivan Morozov collection
- Interesting fact: on Danielsson’s reading the title is an ordinary Tahitian greeting, not a philosophical question
