A world of influence: Gauguin in Tahiti
At the end of the 19th century, French painter Paul Gauguin left his home in Paris to escape, as he put it, “everything that is artificial and conventional”. He was headed for French Polynesia and would settle in Tahiti. A mysteriously alluring island, whose unconventional beauty extended to both its people and its landscapes, Tahiti was evoked in works such as Fatata te Miti and Mahana No Atua, paintings which years later would sell just shy of $40 million apiece.
It was Tahiti that made Gauguin so feted and not the other way around. One of the 118 islands spread over two and a half million square miles of South Pacific ocean, Tahiti is an inspirational feast: from the beauty of its nature, to that of its people, their traditions and language. Gauguin was enthralled, obsessed even with the exotic beauty of everything he discovered here. It was his yearning for a lost paradise, a lost innocence that so consumed him in his art, a yearning that led him to Tahiti. It explains his many paintings of barely adult, innocent-faced Tahitian girls who are posed against a backdrop of mysterious jungle. Subjects that have come to define his paintings and his oeuvre.
